SPIRITUAL  DRAMA 


NATHANIEL  WRIGHT  STEPHENSON 


THE 

SPIRITUAL  DRAMA 

IN  THE 

LIFE  OF  THACKERAY 


BY 

NATHANIEL  WRIGHT  STEPHENSON 

PROFESSOR  OF  HISTORY   IN  THE  COLLEGE  OF   CHARLESTON 


HODDER  &  STOUGHTON 
LONDON  MCMXIII 


Copyright,  19 13,  by 
GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


*.:  :• 


c 


TO 

LANCELOT  MINOR  HARRIS 

A   SEARCHING  THINKER    DELICATELY    KEEN 
I  SUBMIT  THIS  ARGUMENT 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I  Introduction    .     ,..    ..     ,.,     .     .  n 

II  Early  Life      ,..    ..     ,.,    ^.,     .     ,.  20 

III  Apprenticeship      ,.,    ,.     ,.,     .     ,.  46 

IV  Vanity  Fair 72 

V  EiND  OF  the  First  Manner    ..     .  97 

VI    The  Turning  Point     .     .     .     .122 

VII     Readjustment   .     .     .     .     .     .150 

VIII     Following  "The  Newcomes*'  .     .173 

IX    The  Final  Triumph     ...       180 

[Chronology      uj    isj    w    l.j    i.j    i..  191 


SPIRITUAL  DRAMA 


THE 

SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN  THE 

LIFE  OF  THACKERAY 

CHAPTER  I 

INTRODUCTION 

THE  prose  novel  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, like  the  poetical  drama  of  the 
Age  of  Elizabeth,  ran  a  definite 
course.  We  can  put  a  finger  on  the  time  when 
it  began;  we  can  trace  the  curve,  so  to  speak, 
of  its  development;  we  are  about  agreed  that 
it  has  finished.  We  are  again  in  the  position 
of  Tennyson  in  his  youth  when  the  world 
stood  consciously  on  a  threshold  and  heard — 

The  spirit  of  the  years  to  come 
Yearning  to  mix  himself  with  life. 

At  such  a  moment  it  is  profitable  to  review 

the  effort  of  the  preceding  age.     The  next  few 

years  are  likely  to. see  a  general  settlement  of 

opinion— -perhaps  temporary,  perhaps  final — 

with  regard  to  the  great  writers  of  the  age  of 

II 


1^'      l^tiE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

George  IV  and  Victoria.  At  least,  we  shall 
come  to  a  conclusion  as  to  what  they  signify  to 
the  century  now  beginning.  We  shall  decide 
what  part  of  their  endeavour  we  wish  to  take 
up  and  carry  forward,  what  part  we  wish  to 
abjure.  Every  literary  epoch  becomes,  at  last, 
a  residue  of  itself  that  enters  as  leaven  into  the 
age  beyond.  It  is  well,  in  the  present  case,  to 
enquire  what  part  of  the  leaven  is  good,  what 
bad. 

The  present  essay  is  a  slight  contribution  to 
such  enquiry.  I  do  not  aspire  to  be  Thack- 
eray's biographer.  Much  is  still  to  be  said 
and  contested  ere  his  life  can  be  properly 
written.  What  I  seek  to  do  is  to  make  plain 
one  view  of  the  nature,  the  evolution,  the  sig- 
nificance of  his  work.  By  way  of  prelude 
there  are  certain  singularities  in  his  career  that 
should  be  reconsidered.  His  great  fame  has 
been  achieved  slowly;  much  of  it  since  his 
death.  In  his  own  time  he  was  never  the 
power  that  Dickens  was.  He  was  keenly  sen- 
sible of  that  fact  and  it  is  probable  that  all  his 
life  long  he  looked  upon  himself  as  more  or 
less  a  failure.  "Nobody  reads  it,"  he  said 
wearily  of  his  own  masterpiece.  And  yet,  to- 
day, nearly  half  a  century  after  his  death,  new 
editions  of  him  appear  at  short  intervals. 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      13 

His  novels  have  been  a  battleground.  And 
we  should  note  that  what  people  have  fought 
over  is  the  view  of  life  which  those  novels  ex- 
press. Dickens  has  had  partisans  and  detrac- 
tors but  their  disagreement  has  been  on  ques- 
tions of  art.  Dickens'  thinking,  so  far  as  it 
goes,  is  rejected  by  few.  It  is  the  way  in 
which  the  thought  is  embodied  that  offends 
some  people  and  delights  others.  With 
Thackeray,  on  the  other  hand,  the  artistic  issue 
is  swallowed  up  in  a  moral  one.  Though  peo- 
ple have  wrangled  over  his  methods,  they  have 
fought  to  a  finish  over  his  principles. 

Personally,  he  was  one  of  the  kindest, 
gentlest,  most  lovable  of  men.  He  was  also 
one  of  the  most  unfortunate.  No  man  ever 
had  a  more  sensitive  craving  for  happiness; 
few  men  have  been  more  closely  acquainted 
with  sorrow.  He  was  a  mixture  of  splendid 
virtue  with  engaging  weakness.  There  was 
much  in  him  to  move  us  to  tears;  nothing  to 
arouse  our  scorn.  Allowing  for  an  abnormal 
sensitiveness  with  which  he  was  cursed  by  Na- 
ture, he  led  the  life  of  a  hero.  Great  as  are 
his  books,  his  life  to  the  sympathetic  observer 
is  also  great. 

What  strikes  us  at  once  is  the  fact  that  the 
life  and  the  work  are  uniquely  bound  together, 


14       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAIMA  IN 

yet  strangely  discordant.  The  more  we  study 
the  books,  the  more  certain  we  are  that  almost 
all  their  material,  at  bottom,  is  his  ow^n  experi- 
ence. But  there  are  things  in  the  life  that 
seem  at  first  blush  to  have  had  little  effect  upon 
the  work.  And  these  are  the  noblest  things 
the  life  contained, — constancy,  love,  unselfish- 
ness, such  are  the  keynotes  of  Thackeray's  life. 
Why  is  it  that  we  do  not  think  of  them  as  the 
keynotes  of  his  novels?  That  question  must 
be  answered  as  we  proceed. 

A  word,  here,  upon  the  sequence  of  the 
greater  novels.  Their  order  with  the  years 
that  may  fairly  claim  them  is  as  follows: 
Barry  Lyndon,  1844;  J^^^i^y  Fair,  1847;  Pen- 
dennis,  1849;  Esmond,  1852;  The  Newcomes, 
1854;  The  Virginians,  1858;  Philip,  1861; 
Denis  Duval,  1864.  I^  ^^^  ^^st,  an  incom- 
parable tour-de-force,  we  have  the  worst  man 
Thackeray  ever  drew.  Barry  Lyndon  is  a  stu- 
pendous image  of  pure  selfishness  void  of 
scruple.  It  is  repeated  with  modifications  in 
each  of  those  colossal  egoists.  Lord  Steyne, 
Marlborough  and  Lord  Ringwood.  Perhaps 
the  first  question  to  be  reckoned  with  in  an 
estimate  of  Thackeray  is:  What  is  the  sig- 
nificance of  this  procession  of  colossal  egoists? 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      15 

The  charge  of  cynicism  is  so  common  in  con- 
nection with  Thackeray  that  one  prepares  at 
once  to  receive  the  sneering  attack,  "See,  his 
men  of  power  are  all  scoundrels."  Until  we 
reach  Denis  Duval,  in  which  there  is  a  man 
of  power  who  is  not  a  scoundrel,  the  sneer  may 
be  defended.  But  the  person  who  does  so  con- 
demns himself.  He  fails  in  two  respects. 
He  fails  to  follow  closely  Thackeray's  thought 
about  those  men.  He  fails  to  enter  fully  into 
Thackeray's  mood  as  an  artist. 

As  to  the  thought,  one  is  almost  tempted  to 
decline  to  defend  it.  Not  to  perceive  his 
burning  hatred  of  such  men  is  to  confess  one- 
self obtuse.  "But  yet,"  the  detractor  may  re- 
ply, "what  does  that  signify?  If  he  hates 
them  why  does  not  he  make  them  unsuccess- 
ful? Lyndon  and  Marlborough,  to  be  sure, 
are;  but  Steyne  and  Ringwood  are  not."  Two 
things  are  to  be  said  in  reply.  First,  Thack- 
eray tried  to  be  true  to  life — we  shall  enquire 
later  whether  he  was — and  in  life  evil  is  often 
successful.  One  of  the  typical  features  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  a  feature  never  to  be  for- 
gotten in  examining  it,  was  its  consciousness 
of  successful  sin.  This  is  especially  true  of 
its  finest  minds.     No  more  significant  line  was 


16       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

penned  in  that  century  than  Lowell's  ^'Right 
for  ever  on  the  scaffold,  wrong  for  ever  on  the 
throne." 

Every  age  has  a  typical  literary  motive 
which  underlies  all  its  great  books.  The  typ- 
ical motive  of  the  time  of  Thackeray  was  the 
conquest  of  evil  over  good.  Dickens,  to  be 
sure,  broke  boldly  through  such  thinking. 
But  Dickens,  like  the  greater  Browning,  was 
not  among  the  writers  who  are  the  peculiar 
expression  of  his  time.  Rather,  he  like 
Browning  seems  a  great  intruder,  a  reincar- 
nation of  some  younger,  more  trustful  age,  or 
else  the  herald  of  a  mightier  age  to  come.  We 
smile  at  his  crudities;  we  may  condemn  his 
methods;  but  the  heart  of  man  responds  stead- 
ily to  his  exuberant  conviction  that  in  the  long 
run  right  will  win.  If  we  show  him  a  case  in 
which  "robber  wrong''  prevails,  he  replies,' 
"That  is  an  exception,"  and  pounds  on  fear- 
lessly with  his  gospel,  "Be  not  afraid."  But 
this  was  not,  alas!  the  mood  of  his  time.  The 
typical  age  of  doubt,  it  dragged  its  anchors 
and  went  adrift.  The  utter  hopelessness  of 
the  novels  of  Thomas  Hardy,  their  conviction 
that  almost  nothing  on  earth  goes  right,  show 
the  dark  last  hours  of  the  art  that  was  typical 
of  the  troubled  century. 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      17 

One  other  consideration  should  be  pointed 
out  in  advance.  It  is  a  thoughtless  and  inat- 
tentive reader,  who,  after  finishing  Vanity 
Fair,  written  mainly  in  1847,  can  turn  to 
The  Newcomes  which  took  form  in  1854  and 
not  perceive  immediately  that  between  those 
two  books  the  mood  of  the  author  had  been 
transformed.  In  Vanity  Fair  we  are  borne 
down  by  a  sense  of  what  might  be  termed  the 
predestination  in  character;  the  idea  that  peo- 
ple are  what  they  are;  they  will  be  what  they 
will  be;  nothing  can  alter  their  destinies  be- 
cause nothing  can  change  their  natures.  In 
The  Newcomes  we  are  freed  from  this  idea. 
The  relentlessness  of  the  earlier  book  has  given 
place  to  the  larger  faith — 

*'I  only  trust  that  somehow  good 
Will  be  the  final  goal  of  ill." 

Midway  between  these  two  great  novels 
stands  the  central  fact  of  Thackeray's  life  as 
an  artist,  Henry  Esmond.  It  marks  the  sum- 
mit of  a  watershed.  The  pinnacle  of  his  art, 
it  is  also  the  culmination,  the  cessation,  of  his 
sterner,  more  hopeless,  earlier  mood.  In  it  we 
discern  the  beginnings  of  the  later  mood. 
Though  the  major  figures  are  conceived  fatal- 
istically, certain  minor  figures  strike  the  other 


18       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

note.  Naturally,  we  look  for  the  explanation 
of  this  march  of  mood.  Why,  at  the  time  of 
Vanity  Fair,  was  Thackeray  hopeless  and  de- 
fiant? Why  did  he  turn  the  corner  in  Es- 
mond? How  did  he  work  out  his  salvation 
at  the  end?  These  questions  also  must  be  an- 
swered as  we  proceed. 

To  recapitulate:  in  reviewing  the  proces- 
sion of  Thackeray's  novels  we  notice  a  change 
of  attitude  on  the  part  of  the  creator  toward 
His  creatures.  By  contrasting  the  extremes  we 
are  made  aware  that  the  earlier  point  of  view 
was  comparatively  fatalistic:  the  later,  hope- 
ful. Barry  Lyndon  in  Thackeray's  first  nov- 
el moves  inevitably  toward  his  doom  because 
his  own  nature  can  never  by  any  possibility  be 
reversed.  That  opening  novel  is  upon  the 
wages  of  sin.  So  is  the  second,  Vanity  Fair. 
Pendennis  makes  a  partial  break  in  the  se- 
quence but  the  true  curve  is  recovered  in  Es- 
mond where  the  fatalism  of  character  is  made 
appallingly  plain.  But  there,  also,  begins  the 
new  hopefulness  that  develops  through  the 
later  books  and  swings  Thackeray  round  to  a 
different  point  of  view.  The  biographical 
significance  of  Esmond  demands  our  closest 
attention,  because,  in  writing  it  Thackeray 
seems  to  have  delivered  himself  from  certain 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      19 

dreadful  ideas  and  with  the  completion  of  it 
he  took  a  fresh  start.  When  we  pass  on  into 
The  Newcomes  we  find  that  fatalistic  figures 
are  in  the  minority,  the  fatalistic  note  is  not 
the  major  one.  When  Philip  is  reached  we 
have  at  last  a  really  buoyant  note.  In  Denis 
Duval  the  sense  of  fate  is  hardly  felt  and  it  is 
not  even  suggested  that  man  is  not  the  real 
victor  over  circumstance. 

In  the  chapters  which  follow,  though  it  is 
imperative  to  give  an  outline  of  Thackeray's 
career,  it  is  not  in  the  least  my  intention  to 
plunder  those  charming  prefaces  by  Mrs. 
Ritchie,  which,  I  trust,  her  publishers  will  ere 
long  bring  out  in  a  single  work.  Neither  do 
I  seek  to  conceal  in  a  different  style  the  recent 
and  valuable  though  somewhat  spiteful  life  by 
Mr.  Charles  Whibley.  My  aim  is  to  give 
only  so  much  of  the  career  as  is  needed  to  ex- 
plain the  novels  and  to  extract  from  the  novels 
their  true  biographical  significance. 


CHAPTER  II 

EARLY   LIFE 

WILLIAM  MAKEPEACE 
THACKERAY  was  born  at  Cal- 
cutta,  July  i8,  1811.  His  father 
then  was,  his  grandfather  had  been,  a  compe- 
tent civil  servant  of  the  East  India  Company. 
His  great-grandfather  was  Dr.  Thomas  Thack- 
eray, head  master  of  Harrow,  chaplain  to 
Prince  Frederick  and  an  archdeacon.  His 
father's  mother  was  a  daughter  of  Colonel 
Richmond  Webb  through  whom  Thackeray 
was  remotely  related  to  that  picturesque  sol- 
dier whose  victory  of  Wynandael  plays  so 
great  a  part  in  Henry  Esinond.  Thackeray's 
mother  was  Miss  Anne  Beecher,  who  was  de- 
scribed in  her  youth  as  a  reigning  beauty  in 
the  government  set  at  Calcutta. 

Richmond  Thackeray,  the  father  of  the 
novelist,  died  in  1816,  and  in  1817  William 
Makepeace  was  sent  to  England.  On  the  way 
his  ship  touched  at  St.  Helena  and  his  nurse 

took  him  for  a  glimpse  of  the  "ogre,"  who  was 

20 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      21 

supposed  to  eat  three  sheep  a  day  and  all  the 
little  children  he  could  catch.  Arriving  in 
England,  the  child  was  taken  in  charge  by  an 
aunt  and  was  afterward  at  school  in  the  same 
locality  which  he  has  immortalised  with  Miss 
Pinkerton's  Academy.  But  the  significant 
part  of  his  boyhood  seems  to  attach  to  that  fa- 
mous old  Charterhouse  School  which  all  the 
heroes  of  his  novels  have  attended.  Thack- 
eray entered  Charterhouse  in  1822  and  re- 
mained there  till  1828.  As  a  schoolboy  he  is 
thus  described  by  his  school-mate,  George 
Venables: 

''My  recollection  of  him,  though  fresh 
enough,  does  not  furnish  much  material  for 
biography.  He  came  to  school  young — a 
pretty,  gentle,  and  rather  timid  boy.  I  think 
his  experience  there  was  not  generally  pleas- 
ant. Though  he  had  afterwards  a  scholarlike 
knowledge  of  Latin,  he  did  not  attain  distinc- 
tion in  the  school;  and  I  should  think  that 
the  character  of  the  head-master.  Dr.  Russell, 
which  was  vigorous,  unsympathetic,  and  stern, 
though  not  severe,  was  uncongenial  to  his  own. 
With  the  boys  who  knew  him,  Thackeray  was 
popular;  but  he  had  no  skill  in  games,  and,  I 
think,  no  taste  for  them.  .  .  .  HE  WAS  AL- 
READY KNOWN   BY  HIS   FACULTY 


22        THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

FOR  MAKING  VERSES,  chiefly  parodies. 
I  only  remember  one  line  of  one  parody  on  a 
poem  of  L.  E.  L.'s,  about  'Violets,  dark  blue 
violets';  Thackeray's  version  was  'Cabbages, 
bright  green  cabbages,'  and  we  thought  it  very 
witty.  He  took  part  in  a  scheme,  which  came 
to  nothing,  for  a  school  magazine,  and  he 
wrote  verses  for  it,  of  which  I  only  remember 
that  they  were  good  of  their  kind.  When  I 
knew  him  better,  in  later  years,  I  thought  I 
could  recognise  the  sensitive  nature  which  he 
had  as  a  boy.  .  .  .  His  change  of  retrospective 
feeling  about  his  school  days  was  very  char- 
acteristic. In  his  earlier  books  he  always 
spoke  of  the  Charterhouse  as  the  Slaughter 
House  and  Smithfield.  As  he  became  famous 
and  prosperous  his  memory  softened,  and 
Slaughter  House  was  changed  into  Grey 
Friars  where  Colonel  Newcome  ended  his 
life." 

It  was  Venables,  by  the  way,  when  both 
were  boys  at  Charterhouse,  who  gave  Thack- 
eray the  blow  that  broke  his  nose.  A  more 
significant  event  was  the  friendship  formed  at 
Charterhouse  with  John  Leech,  a  friendship 
which  afterward  helped  Thackeray  to  a  place 
on  the  staff  of  Punch, 

Thackeray's  mother  had  married  in  1818, 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      28 

Major  William  Henry  Carmichael  Smyth,  of 
the  Indian  service,  who  is  supposed  to  be  the 
original  of  Colonel  Newcome.  In  1821,  the 
Smyths  returned  to  England  and  in  1825  took 
a  house  called  Larkbeare,  about  a  mile  and  a 
half  from  Ottery  St.  Mary  in  Devonshire. 
This  house  and  its  surroundings  played  an  im- 
portant part  in  Thackeray's  life.  He  spent, 
there,  his  later  vacations  from  Charterhouse. 
He  lived  at  Larkbeare  from  the  time  he  left 
school  in  May,  1828,  to  the  time  of  his  entrance 
into  Cambridge,  as  a  student  of  Trinity,  Feb- 
ruary, 1829.  If  we  take  down  Pendennis  and 
note  the  likeness  between  the  names  of  Claver- 
ing  St.  Mary  and  Ottery  St.  Mary,  we  have  a 
clew  to  the  sources  of  that  great  book.  Clav- 
ering  St.  Mary  and  Ottery  St.  Mary  are  the 
same.  The  real  town  is  described  in  Thack- 
eray's account  of  the  imaginary  one — that  lit- 
tle old  town  of  Clavering  St.  Mary  with  its 
peaked  roofs  rising  up  amongst  trees,  a  fair 
background  of  sunshiny  hills,  an  old  church 
with  great  grey  towers,  of  which  the 
sun  illuminates  the  delicate  carving,  deepen- 
ing the  shadows  of  the  great  buttresses,  and 
gilding  the  glittering  windows  and  flaming 
vane. 
The  points  of  coincidence  in  the  careers  of 


24       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

Thackeray  and  Arthur  Pendennis  are  numer- 
ous. Both  were  Charterhouse  boys;  both 
lived  in  the  same  part  of  Devonshire;  both 
went  to  Cambridge  and  idled  there;  both  read 
law  and  gave  it  up ;  each  drifted  into  literature 
by  way  of  a  newspaper;  each  became  at  last 
a  successful  novelist.  A  frivolous  observer 
might  insist  on  the  fact  that  each  made  his  first 
appearance  in  print  as  the  author  of  verses  in 
a  Devonshire  county  paper.  But  the  similar- 
ity does  not  extend  to  subject  matter.  Pen's 
first  appearance  was  amatory  and  addressed 
to  Miss  Fotheringay  when  impersonating  Imo- 
gene.  Thackeray's  first  appearance  was  in 
burlesque.  ♦ 

It  would  seem  that  Larkbeare,  in  which  we 
cannot  fail  to  identify  the  Fairoaks  of  Pen- 
dennis, was  to  Thackeray  a  grateful  relief,  not 
to  say  a  haven  of  refuge,  after  Charterhouse 
School.  Too  many  boys  of  genius  have  found 
their  schooldays  irksome,  and  Thackeray  was 
of  the  number.  In  a  letter  which  has  been 
often  quoted  he  wrote  to  his  mother:  ^T 
really  think,  I  am  becoming  terribly  industri- 
ous, though  I  can't  get  Dr.  Russell  to  think  so. 
It  is  hard  when  you  endeavour  to  work  hard 
to  find  your  attempts  nipped  in  the  bud — 
There  are  but  370  in  the  school.     I  wish  there 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      25 

were  but  369."  However  he  escaped  from 
Charterhouse — so  doubtless  the  change  ap- 
peared to  him  at  the  time — and  there  followed 
a  period  which  reminds  one  of  that  interim  in 
the  life  of  Pendennis  between  his  leaving 
school  and  his  entrance  into  the  university. 
Thackeray  pursued  his  studies — '^read,"  as 
people  used  to  say — with  his  stepfather  for 
nearly  a  year.  I  have  mentioned  that  he  en- 
tered Cambridge  in  February,  1829.  He  was 
not  yet  eighteen. 

At  the  University,  he  did  not  distinguish 
himself  any  more  than  at  school.  One  of  his 
college  friends,  a  future  Master  of  Trinity, 
Dr.  Thompson,  has  declared  that  his  compan- 
ions ''did  not  see  in  him  even  the  germ  of  those 
literary  powers  which,  under  the  stern  influ- 
ence of  necessity,  he  afterwards  developed." 
In  his  May  examination  he  was  put  in  the 
fourth  class.  "It  was  a  class,"  says  Dr. 
Thompson,  "where  clever,  'non-reading  men' 
were  put  as  in  a  limbo.  But  though  careless 
of  University  distinction  he  had  a  vivid  ap- 
preciation of  English  poetry,  and  chanted  the 
praises  of  the  old  English  novelists,  especially 
his  model.  Fielding.  He  had  always  a  flow  of 
humour  and  pleasantry  and  was  made  much 
of  by  his  friends.     At  supper-parties,  though 


26       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

not  talkative — rather  observant — he  enjoyed 
the  humours  of  the  hour,  and  sang  one  or  two 
old  songs  with  great  applause.  'Old  King 
Cole/  I  well  remember  to  have  heard  from 
him  at  the  supper  I  gave  to  celebrate  my  elec- 
tion as  scholar.  It  made  me  laugh  excess- 
ively, not  from  the  novelty  of  the  song  but  the 
humour  with  which  it  was  given." 

A  diary  of  Thackeray's  which  he  sent,  in 
portions,  to  his  mother  has  been  preserved  and 
in  part  published.  It  opens  as  follows:  "I 
am  now  about  to  begin  my  first  journal,  my 
dearest  mother,  which  I  hope  will  be  always 
sent  with  the  regularity  which  it  is  my  full 
purpose  to  give  to  it.  After  father  left  me, 
I  went  in  rather  low  spirits  to  S of  Cor- 
pus, and  with  him  strayed  about  among  the 
groves,  or  rather  fields,  which  skirt  the  col- 
leges of  Kings,  Trinity,  etc." 

This  entry  is  dated  Saturday,  28  February, 
1829.  The  journal  to  his  mother  gives  us 
many  pleasant  glimpses  into  the  life  of  a 
"clever  non-reading  man"  eighty  years  ago. 
Also  it  is  a  monument  to  an  affection  which  is 
among  the  beautiful  things  in  Thackeray's 
life.  For  present  purposes,  however,  a  single 
passage  is  all  that  demands  quotation: 

"A  poem  of  mine  hath  appeared  in  a  weekly 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      27 

periodical  here  published  and  called  The 
Snob,  I  will  bring  it  home  with  me.  In  a 
month's  time  I  trust  to  be  at  home.  My  pri- 
vate tutor,  for  a  wonder,  was  not  up  when  I 
went  to  him  at  six  this  morning.  I  cut  lec- 
ture this  morning  and  breakfasted  with  two 
Charterhouse  masters,  Penny  and  Dickens — 
who  are  Charterhouse  masters  all  over. 
Young  had  a  pleasant  wine  party  at  which  for 
a  short  time  I  attended.  'Timbuctoo'  received 
much  laud.  I  could  not  help  finding  out  that 
I  was  very  fond  of  this  same  praise.  The 
men  knew  not  the  author  but  praised  the 
poem;  how  eagerly  I  sucked  it  in.  'AH  is 
vanity!'  " 

The  ^^Timbuctoo"  mentioned  in  this  entry 
was  not  Tennyson's  poem  which  won  the 
Chancellor's  prize  in  1829,  but  a  burlesque  on 
the  same  subject  written  by  Thackeray.  The 
Snob  in  which  it  appeared  was  a  little  period- 
ical which  stated  on  its  title  page  that  it  was 
not  conducted  by  members  of  the  University. 
This  curious  association  of  those  two  great  men 
of  genius  reminds  us  that  Thackeray  and 
Tennyson  became  friends  at  Cambridge. 

Part  of  the  "long  vacation  of  1829  Thack- 
eray spent  at  Paris  studying  French  and  Ger- 
man.    He  came  up  for  his  degree  in  1830,  and 


28       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

was  not  successful.  That  was  the  end  of  his 
University  career. 
The  story  of  Thackeray's  youth  seems  to 
^  have  been  parted  by  him  among  three  of  his 
characters — Pen,  Clive  and  Philip.  To  Pen, 
he  gave  Devonshire,  Cambridge  and  the  Tem- 
ple; to  Philip,  among  other  things,  the  life  of 
the  English  student  in  Paris;  to  Clive  the 
English  lad  in  Germany.  Those  delightful 
chapters  of  The  Newcomes  which  transport 
them  all  to  the  Rhineland  take  a  new  signifi- 
cance as  we  follow  Thackeray's  own  wander- 
ings after  leaving  Cambridge.  He  set  out  in 
the  summer  of  1830  and  by  the  end  of  July 
was  at  Coblenz,  having  stayed  a  month  at 
Godesberg.  But  Weimar  was  the  scene  of 
most  of  his  German  sojourn.  It  is  Weimar 
that  comes  to  life  again  in  the  Pumpernickel 
of  Vanity  Fair. 

Mr.  Herman  Merivale  who  has  said  many 
suggestive  things  about  Thackeray  has  some- 
thing on  this  visit  to  Weimar  which  may,  or 
may  not,  be  conclusive  but  which  sets  us  think- 
ing. ^'Thackeray  was  still  meditating  a  pro- 
fession," writes  Mr.  Merivale,  .  .  .  ^'But  I 
suspect  that  it  was  that  life  at  Weimar  that 
fixed  the  bent  before  he  knew  it — What  else 
could  life  at  Weimar  do?    The  very  name  is 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      29 

suggestive  of  a  Court  of  Letters  which  has  no 
parallel  in  story;  and  that  a  young  man  like 
Thackeray,  fervent  of  heart,  eager  of  years, 
and  imaginative  of  brain,  should  come  out  of 
the  living  presence  of  Goethe,  and  scarce  less 
living  memory  of  Schiller,  unspoiled  for  the 
learned  professions,  and  anything  other  than 
an  author  foredoomed,"  v^as,  thinks  Mr. 
Merivale,  impossible. 

Well,  perhaps.  Thackeray  w^as  a  talented, 
versatile,  idle,  young  man  of  genius.  He 
lived  at  Weimar  where  he  saw  Goethe;  and 
he  admired  Schiller  who  was  recently  dead. 
He  was  keenly  impressionable.  He  was  un- 
certain what  art  to  take  up — if,  indeed,  he 
should  take  up  any.  It  is  quite  possible  that 
Weimar  may  have  influenced  him  more  deeply 
than  he  was  aware.  Certainly,  it  greatly 
pleased  him.  He  wrote  of  it  in  after  years 
that  he  had  ''never  seen  a  society  more  simple, 
charitable,  courteous,  gentlemanlike,  than  that 
of  the  dear  little  Saxon  city  where  the  good 
Schiller  and  the  great  Goethe  lived  and  lie 
buried." 

Thackeray  returned  to  England  in  1831  and 
made  a  choice  of  profession  which  turned  out 
to  be  inconclusive.  He  chose  Law  and  en- 
tered  the   Middle  Temple.     It   is   doubtful 


30       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAJVIA  IN 

whether  his  application  to  Law  was  any  more 
assiduous  than  that  of  Mr.  Arthur  Pcndennis 
or  Mr.  Philip  Firmin.  But  one  thing  that 
he  drew  from  his  life  in  The  Temple  was  a 
store  of  scenery  which  was  laid  away  in  his 
capacious  memory  and  afterward  reproduced 
in  wonderful  combinations.  ''Thackeray  had 
his  originals  in  brick  and  mortar  as  well  as  in 
flesh  and  blood,"  says  Mr.  Merivale,  and  by 
way  of  confirmation  tells  this :  "When  I  was 
myself  living  on  a  third  floor  in  Garden  Court 
— number  three  it  was — I  remember  how  the 
great  man  honoured  me  by  bringing  one  of  his 
gracious  favourites,  Lady  Colville,  to  tea  in 
the  little  rooms,  and  his  pleasure  in  finding 
in  them  the  genuine  originals  of  Chevalier 
Strong's  chambers  in  Shepherd's  Inn,  with  the 
water  pipe  and  gutter  which  served  him  as  a 
retreat  from  his  creditors,  watchful  behind  the 
sported  oak,  into  Costigan  and  Bows'  nest  next 
door." 

Law  and  politics  keep  so  close  together  that 
Thackeray's  next  departure  is  not  surprising. 
In  1832,  the  year  of  the  Reform  Bill,  when  he 
should  have  been  hard  at  work,  we  find  him 
away  in  Cornwall  electioneering.  He  has 
told  the  tale  in  a  letter  to  his  mother: 

"June   25,    1832,    Polwellan,   West   Looe, 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      31 

Cornwall  Are  you  surprised,  dear  Mother, 
at  the  direction?  Certainly  not  more  pre- 
pared for  it  than  I  was  myself,  but  you  must 
know  that  on  Tuesday  in  last  week  I  went  to 
breakfast  with  Charles  BuUer,  and  he  received 
a  letter  from  his  constituents  at  Liskeard  re- 
questing him  immediately  to  come  down;  he 
was  too  ill,  but  instead  deputed  Arthur  Buller 
and  myself — so  off  we  set,  that  same  night  by 
the  mail,  arrived  at  Plymouth  the  next  day, 
and  at  Liskeard  the  day  after,  where  we  wrote 
addresses,  canvassed  farmers  and  dined  with 
attorneys.  Then  we  came  on  to  Mr.  Buller's 
and  here  I  have  been  very  happy  since  last 
Friday.  On  Wednesday  last  I  was  riding  for 
twelve  hours  canvassing — rather  a  feat  for  me, 
and  considering  I  have  not  been  on  horseback 
for  eight  months,  my  stiffness  yesterday  was  by 
no  means  surprising;  but  it  is  seven  o'clock  of 
a  fine  summer's  morning,  so  I  have  no  fatigue 
to  complain  of.  I  have  been  lying  awake  this 
morning  meditating  on  the  wise  and  proper 
manner  I  shall  employ  my  fortune  in  when  I 
come  of  age,  which,  if  I  live  so  long,  will  take 
place  in  three  weeks.  First,  I  do  not  intend 
to  quit  my  little  chambers  in  the  Temple,  then 
I  will  take  a  'regular  monthly  income  which  I 
will  never  exceed.  .  .  .  God  bless  you,  dear 


32       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

Mother;  write  directly  and  give  your  orders. 
.  .  .  Charles  Duller  comes  down  at  the  end  of 
next  week — if  you  want  me  sooner  I  will  come, 
if  not  I  should  like  to  wait  for  the  reform  re- 
joicings which  are  to  take  place  at  his  arrival, 
particularly  as  I  have  had  a  great  share  in  the 
canvassing." 

How  inevitably  one  thinks  of  the  great  elec- 
tion scenes  in  The  Newcomes  and  their  under- 
study in  Philip! 

Thackeray's  good  resolutions  about  his  prop- 
erty went  the  way  of  so  many  others.  His  for- 
tune and  what  became  of  it  has  been  a  subject 
of  speculation,  but  the  story  seems  now  to  be 
tolerably  plain.  He  came  into  some  20,000 
pounds  in  1832.  Eighteen  months  afterward 
he  wrote  to  his  mother  that  he  should  thank 
heaven  for  making  him  a  poor  man  as  now  he 
would  have  to  work  harder  and  earn  his  bread. 
Three  causes  of  his  ruin  were  a  newspaper,  a 
bank  and  gambling. 

The  latter  was  once  assigned  as  the  main 
cause  of  his  losses,  and  though  the  details  are 
not  public  property,  the  following  incident  was 
first  published  by  permission  of  his  family: 
Along  with  Sir  Theodore  Martin  he  was  walk- 
ing, one  afternoon,  through  the  play  rooms  at 
Spa  and  stopped  at  the  Rouge  et  Noir  table  to 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      33 

look  on.  While  standing  there,  Thackeray 
touched  his  companion  on  the  elbow  and  asked 
him  to  observe  ''a  tall  man,  in  a  seedy  brown 
frock  coat,  at  the  other  end  of  the  table.  The 
man's  appearance  was  that  of  a  broken  down 
gentleman  who  had  still  the  remains  of  a  cer- 
tain distinction  of  manner."  So,  Sir  Theo- 
dore Martin  described  him,  adding  that  as 
they  were  walking  away,  Thackeray  said, 
^'That  was  the  original  of  my  Deuceace;  I 
have  not  seen  him  since  the  day  he  drove  me 
down  in  his  cabriolet  to  my  brokers  in  the  City 
and  I  sold  out  my  patrimony  and  handed  it 
over  to  him."  Thackeray  also  said  that  this 
man  and  another,  knowing  that  he  was  newly 
come  into  money,  induced  him  to  play  ecarte 
with  them;  they  let  him  win  at  first  but  soon 
turned  on  him  and  did  not  let  him  off  until 
they  had  won  fifteen  hundred  pounds.  This 
story  was  told  by  Thackeray  without  any  acri- 
mony and  was  closed  with  this  characteristic 
comment:  ^'Poor  devil!  my  money  doesn't 
seem  to  have  thriven  with  him." 

"You  are  quite  safe,"  wrote  Martin  later  to 
Herman  Merivale,  "in  saying  that  Deuceace 
was  drawn  from  the  life.  I  am  quite  sure  of 
what  I  told  you.  Well  do  I  remember,  as  we 
walked  out  into  the  soft  sweet  air  of  the  sum- 


34       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

mer  evening,  how  a  sort  of  sadness  seemed  to 
settle  upon  Thackeray,  as  if  the  recollection 
of  what  he  had  told  me  had  been  too  much  for 
him;  and  he  said,  although  it  was  quite  early, 
^I  think  I'll  go  home  to  my  hotel,'  which  he 
did.  He  told  me  other  things  in  his  life  of 
a  very  striking  kind,  but  I  know  they  were 
meant  for  myself  alone.  Poor  fellow,  he  had 
some  terribly  bitter  experiences." 

The  second  cause  of  his  loss  of  a  fortune 
was  an  Indian  bank,  the  failure  of  which  is 
supposed  to  be  the  origin  of  that  other  failure 
which  overwhelmed  Colonel  Newcome.  It 
should  be  remembered  that  Major  Smyth  is 
the  reputed  original  of  Colonel  Newcome. 
Both  were  lovable,  simple-hearted,  unpracti- 
cal men  with  a  weakness  for  speculation. 
More  than  once  Major  Smyth  got  his  stepson 
into  difficulties.  If  he  was  Thackeray's  early 
adviser  in  business,  Thackeray  could  hardly 
have  had  a  worse  one. 

His  third  venture  was  also  a  failure.  In 
January,  1833,  appeared  the  first  number  of 
the  National  Standard — a  Journal  of  Litera- 
ture, Science,  Music,  Theatricals  and  the  Fine 
Arts.  By  the  end  of  the  previous  year,  Thack- 
eray had  made  up  his  mind  to  abandon  Law 
and  was  looking  about  for  an  opening  of  an 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      35 

artistic  sort.  He  thought  he  saw  it  in  this 
journal,  which  he  bought  and  undertook  to 
edit.  If  there  is  any  moment  in  his  career 
that  appeals  especially  to  the  cheerful  imagi- 
nation it  is  his  assumption  of  control  over  The 
Standard,  upon  which  he  intended  to  stamp 
his  personality  and  by  which  he  would  make  a 
great  name  and  astonish  the  world.  At  that 
time  he  was  not  quite  twenty-two ;  he  had  just 
discarded  a  profession;  he  was  brilliant,  ar- 
dent, inexperienced,  and  believing.  He  lived 
to  put  the  story  of  his  first  great  defeat  into 
his  novel  of  Lovel  the  Widower. 

''They  are  welcome,"  says  the  bachelor,  "to 
make  merry  at  my  charges  in  respect  of  a  cer- 
tain bargain  which  I  made  on  coming  to  Lon- 
don, and  in  which,  had  I  been  Moses  Primrose 
purchasing  green  spectacles,  I  could  scarcely 
have  been  more  taken  in.  My  Jenkinson  was 
an  old  college  acquaintance,  whom  I  was 
idiot  enough  to  imagine  a  respectable  man. 
The  fellow  had  a  very  smooth  tongue  and  sleek 
and  sanctified  exterior.  He  was  rather  a 
popular  preacher,  and  used  to  cry  a  good  deal 
in  the  pulpit.  He  and  a  queer  wine  merchant 
and  bill  discpunter,  Sherrick  by  name,  had 
somehow  got  possession  of  that  neat  little  lit- 
erary paper.  The  Museum,  which  perhaps  you 


36       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IX 

remember,  and  this  eligible  literary  property 
my  friend  Honeyman,  with  his  wheedling 
tongue,  induced  me  to  purchase." 

In  June,  1833,  Thackeray  went  to  Paris  as 
correspondent  for  The  Standard  and  remained 
in  Paris  through  the  summer.  When  he  came 
back  in  November,  The  Standard  was  in  a  bad 
way.  In  February,  1834,  the  paper  reached 
its  last  number. 

Defeated  in  his  first  great  bout  with  Life, 
with  his  money  gone,  Thackeray  determined  to 
try  his  luck  in  a  different  field  and  set  out  on  a 
serious  attempt  to  be  a  painter.  That  same 
year,  1834,  ^^  began  the  attempt  at  Paris. 
For  two  years,  or  so,  he  struggled  along  trying 
hard  to  draw  and  also,  apparently,  to  write. 
As  everyone  knows  he  never  got  far  in  his 
drawing,  though  some  draughtsmen  have 
thought  he  had  the  making  of  a  fine  hand. 
He  certainly  had  a  delightful  but  unreliable 
trick  of  caricature  which  he  turned  later  to 
good  account.  In  1836,  he  applied  to  Dickens 
for  permission  to  illustrate  Pickwick,  but  his 
services  were  not  accepted.  That  year  ap- 
peared his  first  publication,  "Flore  et  Zephyr," 
a  series  of  eight  satirical  drawings  published 
at  London  and  Paris. 

While  Thackeray  had  been  struggling  along 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      37 

in  Paris,  his  stepfather  had  indulged  his  love 
of  speculation  and  had  organised  a  new  Lib- 
eral paper  called  The  Constitutional.  It  was 
to  begin  on  the  fifteenth  of  September,  1836. 
In  July,  Thackeray  was  appointed  Paris  cor- 
respondent at  eight  guineas  a  week. 

And  now,  with  a  new  lease  of  hope,  this  un- 
daunted dreamer  flung  the  golden  dice  that 
fortune  trusts  so  recklessly  in  the  hands  of 
youth.  The  lady's  name  was  Isabella  Shawe. 
She  was  Irish,  the  daughter  of  a  Colonel  Mat- 
thew Shawe  wfho  had  been  military  secretary 
to  the  Marquis  of  Wellesley.  She  was  a 
minor  and  was  married  to  Thackeray,  ^'with 
consent  of  her  mother,"  as  the  record  shows, 
at  the  British  Embassy  in  Paris,  August  20, 

1836. 

Thackeray  and  his  girl  bride  were  home 
from  their  honeymoon  in  time  for  him  to  begin 
work  as  correspondent  for  The  Constitutional 
in  September.  The  paper  failed  in  July, 
1837,  leaving  a  debt  which  embarrassed 
Major  Smyth  for  several  years.  Now  came  a 
desperate  tug  for  the  Thackerays.  At  one 
time,  he  was  writing  in  Paris  on  ten  francs  a 
day.  Before  the  end  of  1837  he  was  living  at 
13  Great  Coram  Street,  London,  and  doing  all 
sorts  of  hack  work.     It  was  then  that  he  wrote 


38       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

for  The  Times  a  review  of  'The  French  Revo- 
lution," and  was  thus  described  by  Carlyle: 

"The  critic  is  one  Thackeray,  a  half  mon- 
strous Cornish  giant,  kind  of  painter  Cam- 
bridgeman  and  Paris  newspaper  correspond- 
ent, who  is  now  writing  for  his  life  in  London." 

Writing  for  his  life  was  indeed  what  Thack- 
eray was  doing.  All  through  1838  he  wrote 
much  for  The  Times,  for  the  Morning  Chroni- 
cle, for  the  New  Monthly  Magazine,  for 
Fraze/s,  for  Ainsivorth^s,  for  the  Westminster 
Review.  He  had  made  the  acquaintance  of 
Cruikshank  and  wrote  for  his  Omnibus  and  the 
Comic  Almanac.  He  used  both  verse  and 
prose  and  still  tried  to  turn  a  penny  by  draw- 
ing. A  curious  account  of  him,  at  this  time, 
is  a  letter  of  introduction  sent  by  C.  B.  Cole  to 
Cobden  with  one  of  Thackeray's  sketches. 
Cole  thought  that  the  young  man  might  be 
given  work  in  the  Anti-Corn  Law  campaign. 
He  wrote : 

"The  artist  is  a  genius  both  with  his  pen  and 
his  pencil.  His  vocation  is  literary.  He  is 
full  of  humour  and  feeling.  Hitherto  he  has 
not  had  occasion  to  think  much  on  the  subject 
of  Corn  Laws,  and  therefore  wants  the  stuff  to 
work  upon.  He  would  like  to  combine  both 
writing  and  drawing  when  sufficiently  primed. 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      39 

and  then  he  would  write  and  illustrate  ballads, 
or  tales,  or  anything.  I  think  you  would  find 
him  a  most  useful  auxiliary." 

But  Thackeray's  main  bent  had  by  now  be- 
come apparent.  Though  he  was  practising 
three  arts,  drawing,  verse  and  prose,  it  was 
plain  that  only  one  was  his  own.  The  draw- 
ing and  the  verse  were  mere  graceful  embroid- 
eries and  the  real  fabric  was  the  prose. 

But  it  is  also  quite  plain  that  in  those  days 
Thackeray  lacked  conviction  as  to  what  he  was 
fitted  to  write  about.  He  was  not  one  of  your 
lucky  writers  who  are  gifted  with  what  may 
be  called  the  instinct  of  subject  matter,  who 
know  from  the  start  just  what  they  should  deal 
with.  However,  certain  things  were  in  the 
air,  just  then — for  example,  burlesque.  The 
influence  of  Dickens,  who  was  already  in  the 
full  flush  of  his  enormous  popularity,  was  felt 
by  Thackeray  more  deeply  than  his  worship- 
pers like  to  admit  and  when,  in  1838,  he  at 
last  did  something  noteworthy,  the  influence  of 
Dickens  had  a  hand  in  that  success.  It  was 
the  now  famous  Fashionable  Fax  and  Polite 
Annygoats,  by  Charles  Yellowplush,  which 
appeared  ia  Fraze/s  Magazine.  All  of  us 
know  Yellowplush,  the  footman,  Thackeray's 
puppet  satirist,  by  means  of  whom  he  struck 


40       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAJVIA  IN 

some  hard  blows,  and  whose  ^'orthography  is 
inaccurate."  Snobbery  is  the  main  butt  of  the 
shooting  but  the  fire  ranges  pretty  widely  to 
right  and  left.  It  was  through  Yellowplush 
that  Thackeray  dealt  his  merciless  blow  to 
Bulwer.  He  followed  up  his  attack  on  Bul- 
wer  by  that  demi-novel,  so  to  speak,  Catherine, 
which  is  half  a  real  story,  half  a  travesty  on 
Eugene  Aram.  Catherine,  written  in  the 
first  person,  purports  to  be  the  work  of  Ikey 
Solomon.  ''Be  it  granted,"  says  Thackeray  in 
the  epilogue,  "Solomon  is  dull;  but  don't  at- 
tack his  morality.  He  humbly  submits  that, 
in  his  poem,  no  man  shall  mistake  virtue  for 
vice,  no  man  shall  allow  a  single  sentiment  of 
pity  or  admiration  to  enter  his  bosom  for  any 
character  in  the  poem,  it  being  from  beginning 
to  end  a  scene  of  unmixed  rascality,  performed 
by  persons  who  never  deviate  into  good  feel- 
ing." 

Thus  early  do  we  see  that  bent  for  castiga- 
tion,  that  willingness  to  make  assault  upon 
evil,  which  was  afterward  to  be  so  large  a  part 
of  Thackeray's  arsenal.  As  yet,  however,  he 
was  too  obscure  to  be  a  formidable  enemy. 
Years  were  still  to  pass  before  he  ceased  to  be 
a  mere  hack  who  barely  managed  to  make 
both  ends  meet. 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      41 

Thackeray  was  to  be  called  upon,  however, 
to  stand  a  test  far  more  searching  than  ad- 
versity. Hitherto  he  had  been  sustained  by 
the  idyllic  happiness  of  his  marriage.  He  was 
devoted  to  his  wife  and  children — there  were 
three  children,  of  whom  two  survived  infancy 
and  were  their  father's  consolation  in  later 
years — and  this  period  of  his  hardest  pecuni- 
ary struggle  was  undoubtedly  his  happiest 
time.  Speaking  of  his  wife,  long  afterward, 
he  said  to  one  of  his  cousins,  "I  was  as  happy 
as  the  day  was  long  with  her." 

We  come,  now,  to  the  year  1840,  and  the 
catastrophe  which  counts  for  so  much  in  ex- 
plaining Thackeray.  In  the  spring  of  that 
year,  he  made  a  brief  trip  to  Belgium.  When 
he  went  away  his  wife  appeared  to  be  well; 
when  he  returned  she  was  suffering  from  lan- 
guor and  depression.  Her  malady  grew 
steadily  more  distressing.  Thackeray  took  her 
abroad  to  Paris,  and  then  to  Germany,  and  at 
one  time  wrote  home  that  she  was  all  but  cured. 
But  he  was  deceiving  himself.  She  ceased 
presently  to  recognise  people  and  before  long 
it  was  necessary  to  place  her  in  the  constant 
care  of  an  attendant.  Her  mind  had  become 
a  blank. 

The  effects  of  this  blow  upon  Thackeray 


42       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

cannot  be  overestimated.  His  bereavement 
touched  every  fibre  both  of  his  heart  and  his 
brain.  In  him  tenderness  was  very  nearly,  if 
not  quite,  the  major  part  and  there  is  abun- 
dant evidence  that  the  cloud  of  this  great  grief 
never  lifted.  An  old  Irish  groom  in  the 
stables  of  Anthony  Trollope  once  said  to 
Thackeray,  "I  hear  you  have  written  a  book 
upon  Ireland,  and  are  always  making  fun  of 
the  Irish ;  you  don't  like  us."  "God  help  me !" 
said  Thackeray,  turning  away  his  head  as  his 
eyes  filled  with  tears,  "all  that  I  have  loved 
best  in  the  world  is  Irish."  He  wrote  to  a 
young  man  who  was  struggling  for  fortune 
in  order  to  marry,  "If  I  can  see  my  way  to  help 
you,  I  will.  Though  my  marriage  was  a 
wreck,  as  you  know,  I  would  do  it  over  again, 
for  behold  Love  is  the  crown  and  completion 
of  all  earthly  good." 

Again,  years  after,  writing  of  his  two  chil- 
dren whom  he  had  taken  for  a  trip  up  the 
Rhine,  he  says,  "I  sat  with  the  children  and 
talked  with  them  about  their  mother  last  night. 
It  is  my  pleasure  to  tell  them  how  humble 
minded  their  mother  was."  In  still  another 
letter  he  has  touched  upon  this  sad  subject  in 
his  own  inimitable  way: 

"As  I  am  waiting  to  see  Mrs.  Buller,  I  find 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      48 

an  old  Review  with  an  advertisement  in  it, 
containing  a  great  part  of  an  article  I  wrote 
about  Fielding,  in  1840  in  the  Times,  .  ,  . 
My  wife  was  just  sickening  at  that  moment: 
I  wrote  it  at  Margate,  where  I  had  taken  her, 
and  used  to  walk  out  three  miles  to  a  little 
bowling  green,  and  write  there  in  an  arbour — 
coming  home  and  wondering  what  was  the 
melancholy  oppressing  the  poor  little  woman. 
The  Times  gave  me  five  guineas  for  the 
article.  I  recollect  I  thought  it  rather  shabby 
pay,  and  twelve  days  after  it  appeared  in  the 
paper  my  poor  little  wife's  malady  showed 
itself.  .  .  .  God  help  us  what  a  deal  of 
cares,  and  pleasures,  and  struggles  and  happi- 
ness I  have  had  since  that  day  in  the  little  sun- 
shiny arbour,  where,  with  scarcely  any  money 
in  my  pocket  and  two  little  children  (Minnie 
was  a  baby  two  months'  old),  I  was  writing 
this  notice  about  Fielding.  Grief,  Love, 
Fame,  if  you  like :  I  have  had  no  little  of  all 
since  then.  (I  don't  mean  to  take  the  Fame 
for  more  than  it's  worth,  or  brag  about  it  with 
any  peculiar  elation)." 

Thus  the  first  main  division  of  Thackeray's 
life  came  to  an  end.  His  children  were 
sent  to  their  grandparents  in  Paris.  His  wife 
was   placed   in   the   care   of   her   attendant. 


44       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

Thackeray  himself  took  lodgings  and  buried 
himself  in  work.  Little  over  thirty,  but  shut 
up  within  himself  in  the  heart's  solitude; 
broadly  and  deeply  unfortunate;  having  failed 
in  all  his  ventures;  having  parted  with  happi- 
ness; he  fell  into  that  tone  of  brave  sadness 
which  sounds  so  finel)''  through  most  of  his 
books.  For  a  man  who  felt  as  deeply  as 
Thackeray  did,  it  was  not  possible  to  throw 
off  his  burden.  The  most  he  could  do  was  to 
conceal  it.  He  did  so.  He  hid  his  tears  be- 
hind that  whimsical,  pitying  smile  which  is  at 
once  so  brave  and  so  pathetic.  Sometimes  it 
happens  that  the  most  sensitive  people  are  the 
bravest  in  trouble — sometimes,  not  always — 
and  Thackeray  is  a  case  in  point.  From  this 
time  forward  there  is  in  all  his  writings  a 
piercing  sense  of  the  sadness,  the  weariness, 
the  unhappiness  of  the  world.  But  he  does 
not  surrender  to  it.  He  denounces  the  thought 
of  surrender  in  others.  He  has  for  himself  the 
strong  man's  solace  of  work.  Through  all  his 
darkness  he  keeps  faith  that  somehow  the 
"Awful  Father"  will  at  last  untangle  this  sad 
strange  web  of  our  afflictions.  And  always 
to  the  outward  world  he  maintains  an  un- 
broken front.  But  people  who  hold  the  clue 
discern  the  tears  always  behind  the  smile. 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      45 

^*In  attempting  to  understand  his  character," 
wrote  his  friend  Trollope,  '^it  is  necessary  for 
you  to  bear  within  your  own  mind,  the  idea 
that  he  was  always  encountering  melancholy 
with  buffoonery  and  meanness  with  satire." 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  APPRENTICE  HAND 

CCt  I  A  HE  two  key-secrets  of  Thackeray's 
I  great  life,  as  I  take  it,"  says  his 
-*•  most  sympathetic  biographer, 
Herman  Merivale,  ''were  these — Disappoint- 
ment and  Religion.  The  first  was  his  poison; 
the  second  was  his  antidote.  And  the  anti- 
dote won.  No  wonder  that  he  was  disap- 
pointed. First,  a  man  of  fortune,  then  a 
ruined  and  struggling  artist,  then  a  journalist, 
recognised  to  the  full  as  such  even  by  the 
brothers  of  his  craft,  but,  like  them,  very  little 
beyond  it,  then  at  last  the  novelist  and  the  fa- 
mous man,  he  was  thirty-six  before  the  first 
number  of  Vanity  Fair  was  published. 
Till  then  he  was  not  really  known  ...  he 
saw  the  other  of  the  great  twin  brethren,  one 
half  year  his  junior,  in  the  full  flood  of  fame 
at  twenty-four  years  old.  Dickens  was  born 
in  February,  1812.  In  1841  he  was  ban- 
queted at  Edinburgh  as  no  man  was  before, 
with  'Christopher  North'  in  the  chair,  be- 
fore Thackeray  knew  'what  he  was  going  to 

46 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      47 

be/  but  of  the  versatility  of  mind  which  is  as 
great  a  danger  as  a  charm.  Dickens  knew  his 
own  line  from  the  first." 

There  is  more  to  be  said,  however,  than  is 
set  out  in  these  sentences.  Sheer  versatility,  no 
doubt,  stood  in  Thackeray's  way  at  the  start, 
and  he,  like  all  men  of  varied  endowment, 
spent  a  long  time  casting  about  among  his 
talents,  seeking  to  determine  where  lay  his  real 
strength.  Dickens  with  less  natural  endow- 
ment learned  sooner  how  to  use  what  he  had. 
But  when  this  has  been  allowed  for,  the  differ- 
ence between  their  careers  is  not  yet  explained. 
For  an  adequate  explanation  we  must  observe 
the  difference  in  their  natures. 

The  firmness,  not  to  say  hardness,  of  Dick- 
ens contrasts  at  every  point  with  the  gentleness, 
the  sensitiveness,  of  Thackeray.  The  fact  that 
^'Dickens  knew  his  line  from  the  first"  is  in- 
dicative of  a  natural  decision  which  seems  to 
have  been  lacking  in  Thackeray.  The  story 
of  his  youth  shows  how  vividly  he  responded 
to  circumstances,  how  easily  he  passed  from 
one  purpose  to  another,  how  enthusiastically  he 
followed  each  new  venture.  In  a  word,  there 
was  a  side  to  Thackeray  which  most  people 
would  call  weak,  and  for  this  side  of  him  he 
paid  a  sad  price.     And  yet,  it  was  because  of 


48       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

this  side,  when  at  last  it  had  been  refined  and 
tempered  by  suffering,  that  Thackeray  was 
able  to  cast  up  the  sum  of  human  life  with 
truer  justice  and  wider  range  of  vision  than 
any  other  English  novelist  and  also  with  a 
tenderness  of  sympathy  not  equalled  except  by 
Miss  Austen. 

The  sentences  from  Mr.  Merivale  are 
slightly  misleading  because  they  do  not  sug- 
gest that  Thackeray's  religion  had  more  to  do 
than  merely  to  overcome  his  disappointments, 
that  its  greatest  task  was  to  overcome  his  nat- 
ural weakness.  Mr.  Merivale's  silence  upon 
this  point  is  significant.  Thackeray  was  a  type 
of  man  to  whom  most  people  have  great  diffi- 
culty in  being  squarely  just.  If  he  appeal  to 
one  at  all  he  appeals  so  deeply  that  the  tempta- 
tion to  hold  a  brief  for  him  is  great.  If,  on 
the  other  hand,  one  has  that  resolute  self- 
confidence  which  the  parable  of  the  mote  and 
the  beam  does  not  penetrate,  the  temptation  to 
be  clever  at  his  expense  is  hardly  to  be  re- 
sisted. Therein  lies  the  fault  of  the  most  re- 
cent life  of  him,  the  otherwise  valuable  memoir 
by  Mr.  Whibley.  Excellent  as  the  book  is  in 
many  respects  the  general  effect  of  it  is  false. 
For  Mr.  Whibley  ignores  entirely  the  inward 
drama  of  Thackeray's  great  life.     If  one  were 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      49 

to  describe  him  with  as  little  charity  as  he 
shows  to  Thackeray,  one  would  say  that  he 
lacks  spiritual  vision.  He  is  blind  to  that 
long,  slow  but  at  length  victorious  warfare  of 
Thackeray's  religion  against  his  weakness. 

Only  by  keeping  that  drama  in  mind  can  we 
see  him  as  he  really  was,  neither  a  Prometheus 
as  he  appears  to  Mr.  Merivale,  nor  a  senti- 
mentalist as  he  appears  to  Mr.  Whibley,  but 
a  sensitive,  unhappy  man,  who,  in  his  early  life, 
showed  something  of  the  Prometheus:  who 
took  on  for  a  season  not  a  little  of  the  senti- 
mentalist; but  who  became  at  last  bravely  and 
simply  a  Christian. 

The  first  act  of  Thackeray's  inward  drama 
closed  with  the  ruin  of  his  home  in  1840. 
This  occurred  in  the  midst  of  his  literary  ap- 
prenticeship which  it  tended  naturally  to 
darken  and  retard.  His  religion,  at  that  time, 
though  it  saved  him  from  surrender  to  despair, 
was  not  yet  strong  enough  to  keep  his  grief 
within  bounds.  The  result  is  Thackeray's  con- 
stant tendency  in  all  his  earlier  books  to  look 
upon  the  dark  side.  Though  he  knows  there 
are  others  who  are  happy,  though  he  does  not 
lose  faith  in  the  life  to  come  where  somehow 
all  things  will  be  adjusted,  yet,  for  this  pres- 
ent, beneath  the  weight  of  his  own  affliction, 


50       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

he  gives  way  to  the  impulse  to  brood  darkly 
upon  the  wretchedness  of  the  world.  Because 
he  does  so,  it  is  easy  for  the  serene  student  to 
take  the  tone  of  superiority,  to  brand  Thack- 
eray as  a  "sentimentalist."  There  is  no  deny- 
ing that  it  is  a  great  sin  to  make  a  luxury  of 
unhappiness,  to  convert  one's  heart  into  a 
forcing  house  for  woe,  and  from  the  fruit  of 
despair  suck  a  bitter  stimulant.  The  man  who 
does  so  is  indeed  a  sentimentalist,  and  we  must 
admit  that  Thackeray  between  thirty  and 
forty  erred  somewhat  in  that  direction.  And 
yet,  whoso  makes  a  sneer  out  of  this  fact,  con- 
victs himself  of  superficiality,  demonstrates  his 
blindness  to  the  inner  drama  that  was  going  on 
in  this  noble  spirit.  If  Thackeray's  star  went 
down  for  a  time  into  darkness,  it  rose  again 
more  glorious  by  far  than  before  it  set.  As 
to  the  defeat  of  his  resolution  in  these  early 
years,  and  the  glib  verdict  that  has  been  passed 
upon  him,  we  cannot  do  better  than  remember 
Romeo's  line,  ''He  jests  at  scars  who  never  felt 
a  wound." 

In  1 841,  the  year  Dickens  was  banqueted 
at  Edinburgh,  "as  no  man  was  before," 
Thackeray  was  at  Paris  writing  The  Second 
Funeral  of  Napoleon,  of  which  Edward  Fitz- 
gerald, in  a  letter  dated  February  18,  1841, 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      51 

writes  thus :  "Have  you  read  Thackeray's  little 
book,  The  Second  Funeral  of  Napoleon?  If 
not,  pray  do,  and  buy  it  and  ask  others  to  buy 
it:  as  each  copy  sold  puts  71^  d  in  T's  pocket: 
which  is  not  very  heavy  just  now,  I  take  it." 

This  "little  book"  which  purported  to  be  the 
work  of  Michael  Angelo  Titmarsh  is  an  ad- 
mirable specimen  of  Thackeray's  hack  writing. 
The  public  however  "refused  to  read  it." 
After  Thackeray's  death,  as  Mrs.  Ritchie  tells 
us,  the  manuscript  was  contributed  to  the  Corn- 
hill  Magazine  with  this  note  from  the  gentle- 
man who  had  been  her  father's  agent  in  pub- 
lishing it:  "I  had  the  pleasure  of  editing  the 
tiny  volume  for  Mr.  Titmarsh  and  saw  it 
through  the  press,  and  after  awhile,  on  the  dis- 
mal tidings  that  the  little  efifort  made  no  im- 
pression on  the  public,  Mr.  Titmarsh  wrote 
to  me  from  Paris  a  pretty  little  note  commenc- 
ing, 'So  your  poor  Titmarsh  has  made  an- 
other fiasco.  How  are  we  to  take  this  great 
stupid  public  by  the  ears?  Never  mind,  I 
think  I  have  something  that  will  surprise  them 
yet!'  "  The  "something"  seems  to  have  been 
the  first  notes  of  Vanity  Fair,  though  six  years 
were  to  pass  before  they  came  to  anything. 

In  spite  of  the  "stupid  public"  of  that  day 
and  its  lack  of  taste,  the  Second  Funeral  is  a 


52       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

charming  little  book.  Though  it  is  hardly 
more  than  a  newspaper  report,  you  may  go  a 
long  way  before  you  find  elsewhere  such  art 
with  such  faithfulness  to  fact  and  such  simplic- 
ity. Those  two  or  three  pages  in  which  Mr. 
Titmarsh  describes  the  English  family  that 
lodges  in  the  same  house  with  him  are  above 
praise.  How  beautiful  they  are,  how  per- 
fectly simple,  without  the  least  disguise  of 
rhetoric,  but  also  how  full  of  Thackeray's 
mood,  how  wistful!  He  dwells  upon  the  pic- 
ture of  that  happy  family  with  a  loving  insist- 
ence that  betrays  itself.  People  who  are 
happy  themselves  do  not  dwell  thus  fondly  on 
the  spectacle  of  a  contented  family  going  out 
for  a  holiday.  It  is  the  lonely  men  and 
women  who  pause  on  the  street  to  watch  such 
parties,  who  go  home  and  put  into  beautiful 
words  that  loveliest  thing  in  life,  the  simple, 
ordinary  happiness  of  normal  people.  Know- 
ing when  this  little  book  was  written,  knowing 
how  lonely  Thackeray  was,  we  can  read  a 
great  deal  between  the  lines  of  his  description 
of— 

''The  grandfather,  who  is  as  proud  of  his 
wife  as  he  was  thirty  years  ago  when  he 
married,  and  pays  her  compliments  still  twice 
or  thrice  a  day,  and  when  he  leads  her  into  a 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      53 

room,  looks  round  at  the  persons  assembled  and 
says  in  his  heart,  ^Here,  gentlemen,  here  is  my 
wife:  show  me  such  another  woman  in  Eng- 
land!'— this  gentleman  had  hired  a  room  on 
the  Champs  Elysees,  for  he  would  not  have  his 
wife  catch  cold  by  exposing  her  to  the  bal- 
conies in  the  open  air." 

We  need  not  be  told  how  Thackeray  turned 
away  from  that  pretty  picture  and  saw  the  face 
of  his  own  love  with  the  mind  gone  from  it, 
nor  how  wearily  he  went  to  his  work. 

Of  another  book  of  the  same  period.  The 
Great  Hogarty  Diamond,  which  was  also  a 
failure,  Thackeray  has  said,  ''It  was  written  at 
a  time  when  the  author  was  suffering  the 
severest  personal  grief  and  calamity — "  ''at  a 
time,"  he  writes  again,  "when  my  heart  was 
very  soft  and  humble":  namely,  1841.  The 
same  year  he  published  also  Comic  Tales 
which  were  not  much.  In  1 842  he  visited  Ire- 
land, met  Lever  and  collected  material  for  the 
Irish  Sketch  Book  which  came  out  the  year 
after.  Punch,  meanwhile,  had  come  into  ex- 
istence with  Leech  as  a  contributor.  Leech 
succeeded  in  getting  on  the  staff  his  old  school- 
mate and  in  June,  1842,  Thackeray  contributed 
The  Legend  of  Jawbrahim  Heraudee.  The 
same  year  Miss  Tickletoby^s  Lectures  on  Eng- 


54       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

glish  History  came  out  in  Punch.  Thackeray 
not  only  wrote  for  Punch  but  also  made  draw- 
ings. He  contributed  in  all  380  sketches. 
One  of  them  has  a  curious  notoriety.  No  one 
has  ever  been  able  to  determine  what  it  is 
about.  A  rival  paper  once  offered  a  prize  for 
a  solution  of  the  riddle.  In  1843,  Thackeray 
was  included  in  the  Christmas  dinner  of  ^'Mr. 
Punch's  Cabinet." 

During  the  five  years  following  his  great 
catastrophe  Thackeray  lived  in  chambers — 
first  at  27  Jermyn  Street,  then  at  88  St.  James 
Street — while  his  children  remained  with  their 
grandparents.  His  poverty  shut  him  out  of 
the  more  conspicuous  society  of  the  day  and 
such  pleasure  as  he  had  was  derived  from  ob- 
serving the  reckless  humours  of  Bohemia  and 
from  the  life  of  his  clubs.  As  early  as  1833, 
when  he  was  a  prosperous  youth  of  twenty-two, 
he  had  joined  the  Garrick  Club.  In  March, 
1840,  he  had  been  elected  to  the  Reform  Club. 
"He  was  a  frequenter,"  says  his  son-in-law,  Sir 
Leslie  Stephen,  "of  'Evans'  described  in  many 
of  his  works,  and  belonged  at  this  and  later 
periods  to  various  sociable  clubs  of  the  old- 
fashioned  style,  such  as  the  Shakespeare,  the 
Fielding  (of  which  he  was  a  founder)  and 
*Our  Club.'     There  in  the  evenings  he  met 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      55 

literary  comrades  and  gradually  became 
known  as  an  eminent  member  of  the  fraternity. 
Meanwhile,  as  he  said,  although  he  could  suit 
the  magazines,  he  could  not  hit  the  public," 

The  experience  of  these  years,  the  club  life 
and  the  Bohemian  life,  was  afterward  minted 
into  sterling  fiction  and  made  precious  chap- 
ters in  Pendennis,  The  Newcomes,  and 
Philip,  Such  odd  resorts,  half  bar-room, 
half  club,  as  the  ^'Back  Kitchen,"  and  the 
"Cave  of  Harmony,"  gave  Thackeray  a  part  of 
his  recreation  in  those  lonely  years  between 
1 840  and  1 846.  He  learned  to  know  the  whole 
world  of  Grub  Street  and  when  in  after  years 
he  depicted  it  without  reserve — its  foibles,  its 
vanities,  its  jealousies — he  was  accused  of 
being  a  snob  and  of  "fostering  a  prejudice 
against  literary  men." 

The  association  in  the  popular  mind  of 
Thackeray  with  snobdom  dates  from  1846 
when  the  famous  Snob  Papers^  afterward  col- 
lected as  the  Book  of  Snobs,  began  running  in 
Punch.  We  should  notice  that  it  was  a  sharp 
and  satiric  subject,  one  with  which  he  could 
give  vent  to  his  bitter  mood,  that  enabled 
Thackeray  to  write  with  sufficient  edge  to  cut 
his  way ,  through  the  public  indifference. 
^'Tke  Snob  Papers  had  a  very  marked  effect," 


56       THE  SPIRITUAL'  DRAMA  IN 

to  quote  from  Sir  Leslie  Stephen,  "and  may  be 
said  to  have  made  Thackeray  famous.  The 
success  of  the  Snob  Papers  perhaps  led  Thack- 
eray to  insist  a  little  too  frequently  upon  a  cer- 
tain variety  of  social  informity.  He  was  occa- 
sionally accused  of  sharing  the  weakness  which 
he  satirised  and  would  playfully  admit  that 
the  charge  was  not  altogether  ground- 
less. .  .  .  Thackeray  was  at  this  time  an  in- 
habitant of  Bohemia  and  enjoyed  the  humours 
and  unconventional  ways  of  the  region.  But 
he  was  a  native  of  his  own  Tyburnia  forced  in- 
to Bohemia  by  distress  and  there  meeting  many 
men  of  the  Bludger  type  who  were  his  in- 
feriors in  refinement  and  cultivation — Thack- 
eray an  intellectual  artistocrat  though  politic- 
ally a  liberal  was  naturally  an  object  of  some 
suspicion  to  the  rougher  among  his  compan- 
ions. If  he  appreciated  refinement  too  keenly 
no  accusation  of  anything  like  meanness  has 
ever  been  made  against  him." 

A  great  deal  has  been  made  of  the  charge 
that  Thackeray  was  morbid  on  the  subject  of 
snobbery.  Says  Mr.  Whibley,  who  never  loses 
a  chance  to  be  hard  upon  him,  "the  truth  is 
Thackeray  had  'an  eye  for  a  snob';  he  tracked 
snobs  through  history  as  certain  little  dogs  in 
Hampshire  hunt  out  truffles.     Wherever  there 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      57 

was  a  man  he  saw  a  snob;  if  the  man  were  of 
high  rank,  he  overvalued  himself;  if  he  were 
of  low  rank  he  overvalued  others.  Lady 
Bareacres  is  a  snob  because  she  spends  more 
than  she  can  afford:  Lady  Scraper  is  a  snob 
because  she  prefers  a  mutton  chop  eaten  in 
splendour  to  a  whole  saddle  consumed  at  Brix- 
ton; Sir  Walter  Raleigh  was  a  snob,  because, 
being  a  loyal  courtier,  he  spread  his  cloak  be- 
neath the  feet  of  his  sovereign." 

Mr.  Whibley's  book  is  a  valuable  contribu- 
tion to  the  study  of  Thackeray  because  in  it  a 
number  of  relationships  between  the  novels 
and  their  ^'sources"  have  been  clearly  traced 
and  compactly  presented.  But  from  first  to 
last  it  is  void  of  humanity.  Upon  matters 
purely  technical,  Mr.  Whibley  is  admirable. 
If  the  problem  of  a  great  author's  life  could 
be  solved  by  conceiving  of  him  as  a  trinity  of 
pen,  ink-pot  and  sheet  of  paper,  Mr.  Whibley 
would  be  the  man  to  do  it.  The  idea  that  a 
writer  like  other  men  has  his  soul — and  that 
the  state  of  it  must  always  contain  his  final 
secret — is,  to  Mr.  Whibley,  an  exploded  super- 
stition. When  one  is  freed  completely  from 
that  troublesome  and  old-fashioned  belief,  and 
can  put  in  its  place  a  conviction  that  the  real 
world  is  one's  table  top,  one  may,  if  one  is 


58       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

clever,  become  a  sparkling  writer  for  whom 
everything  is  on  the  surface.  Mr.  Whibley  is 
very  clever  but  he  writes  down  his  own  con- 
demnation in  his  final  chapter  when  he  says 
that  what  Thackeray  ^'was  at  the  beginning  he 
was  at  the  end — a  man  of  letters  to  whom  time 
and  experience  gave  not  a  new  style,  but  merely 
a  better  control  of  his  material."  Style,  tech- 
nique— in  a  narrow  case, — is  all  Mr.  Whibley 
can  see.  Otherwise  he  is  literarily  colour 
blind.  But  the  great  thing  in  Thackeray  is 
the  revolution  in  his  "material"  wrought  by 
time  and  experience  through  the  development 
of  his  religious  sense.  His  style  may  not  have 
changed  radically  but  his  ''tone"  did.  Cen- 
sure which  he  deserved  when  he  wrote  the 
Book  of  Snobs,  ceased  afterward  to  have  point. 
What  Mr.  Whibley  says  against  him  fits  the  de- 
spairing Thackeray  of  the  age  of  thirty-five. 
We  shall  see  how  such  censure  ceased  to  ap- 
ply. 

That  year,  1846,  beheld  the  appearance  of 
Mr.  Titmarsh's  Journey  from  Cornhill  to 
Grand  Cairo.  It  was  based  on  a  trip  to  the 
Levant  made  two  years  previous  when  the 
directors  of  the  Peninsular  and  Oriental  Com- 
pany had  presented  Thackeray  with  free  pas- 
sage. 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      59 

In  Frazer's,  during  1846,  appeared  his  first 
great  achievement,  The  Luck  of  Barry  Lyn- 
don, 

This  powerful  novel,  however,  was  not  suc- 
cessful and  was  not  reprinted  as  a  volume  un- 
til long  afterward.  To-day,  the  exclusive 
student,  profiting  by  the  accident  of  a  special 
training,  reads  Barry  Lyndon  and  exclaims 
"What  a  wonderful  work  of  art!  How  ob- 
tuse was  the  audience  which  did  not  perceive 
its  excellence !"  With  a  shrug  of  disdain,  per- 
haps, he  turns  the  cold  shoulder  to  that  whole 
world  which  applauded  Dickens  during  ten 
hard  years  before  Thackeray  got  a  hearing. 

Undoubtedly  Barry  Lyndon  is  one  of  the 
most  remarkable  performances  in  fiction. 
But  just  as  surely  it  could  never  be  popular. 
The  fact  that  Thackeray  wrote  such  a  book, 
while  struggling  to  establish  himself,  shows 
that  he  had  failed  signally  to  allow  for  the 
difference  between  the  point  of  view  of  the 
artist  and  the  point  of  view  of  the  audience. 
This,  I  think,  is  the  true  explanation  of  his 
slow  acceptance  by  the  public.  We  of  the 
Gothic  races  do  not  as  a  rule  have  much  capac- 
ity for  getting  pleasure  from  watching  an 
artist  at  work.  With  us,  as  a  rule,  the  subject 
is  before,  all  else.     Our  papular  writers  know 


60       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAJNIA  IN 

this  by  instinct,  and  build  upon  it.  They  make 
their  methods  mere  pack  horses  for  their  mat- 
ter. But  now  and  then  we  have  an  artist  so 
stubbornly  of  the  other  sort  that  only  after  a 
long  beating  will  he  take  the  public  at  its  word, 
cease  to  think  first  about  method  and  begin 
thinking  first  about  matter.  Thackeray  was 
such  an  artist.  No  one  ever  expressed  more 
exactly  the  characteristic  feeling  of  such  an 
artist  than  he  did  in  those  fine  sentences  in 
Philip  which  describe  the  painter,  "J.  J."  at 
his  easel.  Thackeray  loses  himself  in  his  sym- 
pathy with  the  mere  technical  battle  against 
lights,  shades,  tones,  and  tints.  He  forgets,  for 
the  moment,  whether  it  is  the  blush  of  a  peach 
or  a  woman  which  the  painter  seeks  to  ex- 
press. He  forgets  everything  but  the  strug- 
gle of  the  artist  with  his  technical  difficulties. 
His  sympathy  is  as  deep,  his  enthusiasm  as 
real,  as  if  he  were  watching  an  army  in  its  as- 
sault on  a  fortress.  When  the  painter,  calling 
up  his  last  reserve,  puts  forth  his  entire 
strength  and  advancing  along  his  whole  line, 
takes  the  difficulty  by  storm,  Thackeray  throws 
up  his  cap  and  wants  to  shout  for  joy. 

What  stood  in  Thackeray's  way  was  the  in- 
ability of  his  audience  to  have  similar  feelings 
for  a  book.     He  kept  forgetting  the  value 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      61 

which  his  audience  set  on  subject  matter.  So 
vivid  was  his  own  interest  in  how  things 
were  done  that  he  was  willing,  almost  to  let 
his  subject  take  care  of  itself — to  write  on 
whatever  came  uppermost  in  his  mind — and 
seek  to  make  his  effect  by  the  way  in  which  his 
material  was  handled.  Herein  was  his  con- 
trast with  the  other  of  "the  great  twin  brethren 
of  the  novel."  Dickens  advanced  into  litera- 
ture along  the  broad  high  road  of  the  signifi- 
cance of  subject  matter.  The  youthful  author 
of  Pickwick  stepped  confidently  on  the  stage 
and  claimed  the  attention  of  his  audience  by 
right  of  the  diverting  information  he  would 
impart.  The  youthful  Thackeray,  without 
that  consciousness  of  some  definite  thing  to  say, 
but  aware  of  his  artistic  superiority,  found  it 
hard  to  understand  why  his  work  did  not  take. 

The  subjects  which  rose  of  themselves  to  the 
top  of  his  mind  were  too  sombre  for  his  au- 
dience, and  he,  being  deficient  in  the  instinct 
for  matter,  was  too  willing  to  let  them  pass 
unchallenged,  too  ready  to  spend  his  whole 
strength  upon  the  difficulties  of  expression. 
In  a  word,  Thackeray,  the  born  stylist,  was 
prone  to  forget  that  there  are  other  things  in  a 
novel  beside  style. 

The  admirer  of  Barry  Lyndon  must  be  able 


62       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

to  lose  himself  in  the  love  of  style.  Otherwise 
the  book  would  be  intolerable.  For,  in  this, 
his  first  novel  worth  the  name,  Thackeray  set 
himself  a  great  task  but  one  in  which  the  sub- 
ject matter  cannot  possibly  attract  us.  In 
doing  so  he  built  to  some  extent  on  his  savage 
and  unpleasant  Catherine,  of  six  years  pre- 
vious. 

The  words  in  which  he  describes  the  former 
book  apply  equally  well  to  the  latter,  "it  being 
from  beginning  to  end,  a  scene  of  unmixed 
rascality  performed  by  persons  who  never 
deviate  into  good  feeling." 

So  much  for  the  repulsiveness  of  the  subject. 
The  greatness  of  the  artistic  achievement  is  in 
this :  it  exposes  a  scoundrel  through  his  auto- 
biography. Thackeray  indeed  had  his  cour- 
age about  him  when  he  attempted  it. 

To  invent  a  career  in  which,  from  the  first 
action  to  the  last,  there  never  shall  be  one  mo- 
ment of  unselfishness,  nor  one  glimmer  of  real 
affection;  to  put  the  tale  of  this  career  into  the 
mouth  of  the  wretch  himself;  to  make  him 
candid  and  yet  keep  our  interest:  this  is  an 
undertaking  to  which  few  novelists  are  equal. 
But  just  this  is  what  Thackeray  did  and  the  re- 
sult is  a  tour-de-force  of  the  first  magnitude. 
Barry  is  perfectly  frank;  he  conceals  nothing: 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      63 

we  know  he  is  an  arch  scoundrel — cheat,  liar, 
gambler,  brute — and  yet  he  never  becomes  a 
mere  monster,  he  always  retains  a  touch  of 
grace,  and  he  keeps  our  interest.  Further- 
more, his  self-revelation  never  appears  to  be 
forced.  While  we  listen,  it  seems  quite  the 
natural  thing.  Only  in  retrospect  do  we  real- 
ise how  unnaturally  frank  he  has  been.  As 
sheer  art,  this  first  of  Thackeray's  great  crea- 
tions is  equal  to  any. 

The  materials  of  the  book  may  be  traced, 
first  of  all,  in  Thackeray's  own  experience. 
The  external  misfortunes  of  his  youth  were  due 
chiefly  either  to  the  dissembling  greed  of  a 
gambler  or  to  the  selfish  wiliness  of  schemers. 
Throughout  his  novels,  the  gambler  and  the 
schemer  are  most  frequent  among  the  human 
causes  of  unhappiness.  In  the  darkness  of  his 
earlier  mood  Thackeray  combined  the  two, 
called  the  result  Barry  Lyndon,  and  fairly 
gloated  upon  the  masterful  sublety  with  which 
he  exposed  its  evil.  However,  the  piecing  to- 
gether of  episodes  into  a  general  narrative 
came  hard  for  him  and  in  order  to  get  assist- 
ance in  constructing  Barry's  career  he  appears 
to  have  had  recourse  to  several  books. 

First  of  all  he  drew  from  Fielding.  In 
Jonathan  Wild  he  found  a  model  by  which  he 


64       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

profited  in  everything  relating  to  method. 
This  great  book,  like  Barry  Lyndon,  is  the 
sustained  portrait  of  a  scoundrel,  and  like  it  is 
a  triumph  of  art.  For  one  of  the  most  striking 
episodes  in  Barry  Lyndon,  that  of  Duke  Vic- 
tor and  his  wretched  wife,  Thackeray  was  in- 
debted to  a  book  called  L  Empere,  on  dix 
ans  sous  Napoleon.  The  portrait  of  Sir 
Charles  Lyndon  is  supposed  to  be  a  study  of 
Charles  Hanbury  Williams,  described  by  Mr. 
Whibley  as  "a  great  wit  in  a  witty  age,  a  diplo- 
mat and  man  of  the  world,  whose  fate  was  as 
hapless  as  Lyndon's  own."  Three  historic 
characters  were  drawn  upon  for  Barry's  ad- 
ventures— that  famous  prince  of  gamblers, 
Casanova;  the  singular  English  scoundrel, 
Andrew  Robinson  Stoney;  and  an  Irish  black- 
guard called  Tiger  Roche.  To  the  latter  Mr. 
Whibley  assigns  a  good  deal  of  the  character 
of  Barry  and  perhaps  has  reason  to  do  so.  To 
the  ^'memoirs"  of  Casanova  is  due,  beyond  a 
doubt,  Thackeray's  general  knowledge  of  the 
gaming  life  of  the  eighteenth  century.  The 
main  action  of  the  book  seems  to  have  been  de- 
rived chiefly  from  the  career  of  Stoney. 

That  blackguard,  after  marrying  one  heiress 
and  abusing  her,  made  a  capture  of  the  blue 
stocking  countess   of   Strathmore,   of  whom 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      65 

Lady  Lyndon  is  an  echo.  ^'Even  in  the  small- 
est details  the  similarity  of  truth  and  fiction 
is  evident,"  says  Mr.  Whibley,  speaking  of  the 
debt  of  the  novel  to  the  career  of  Stoney. 
However,  we  must  always  allow  for  Mr. 
Whibley's  desire  to  steal  a  morsel  from 
Thackeray's  credit,  though,  as  he  points  out,  a 
passage  which  he  quotes  from  a  chap  book  of 
the  day,  fits  "Barry  and  his  spouse  to  a  hair." 
The  passage  is  as  follows:  '^Here  then  were 
joined  in  holy  wedlock,  two  such  as  for  the 
honour  of  nature  are  seldom  to  be  seen.  The 
one  had  broken  the  heart  of  a  former  wife:  the 
other  had  not  lengthened  the  days  of  a  former 
husband :  in  a  battle  royal  of  a  main  of  cocks, 
the  two  surviving  ones  contend  for  existence, 
and  thus  are  these  two  pitted  as  if  by  positive 
destruction." 

From  these  materials  Thackeray  constructed 
a  character  which  absorbed  into  one  great  por- 
trait the  very  essence  of  that  whole  world  of 
heartless  and  false  people  who  were  attacked 
in  the  Book  of  Snobs.  Barry's  idea  of  being  a 
gentleman  is  to  dress  well,  to  wear  a  sword 
with  grace,  and  to  be  on  easy  terms  with  the 
great.  He  is  a  professional  gambler  who  has 
played  in  every  capital  of  Europe.  "Play 
grandly,"  says  he,  "honourably.     Be  not  of 


66       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAJNIA  IN 

course,  cast  down,  at  losing;  but  above  all  be 
not  eager  at  winning  as  mean  souls  are."  His 
manners,  his  gentlehood,  his  air,  all  these  are 
put  on  from  without  like  a  garment.  He  does 
not  know  that  they  are.  He  believes  in  them 
thoroughly.  Just  the  same  there  is  nothing 
genuine  in  him  but  his  selfishness,  his  audacity, 
and  his  wits.     Here  is  his  philosophy: 

^'The  broker  of  the  exchange  who  bulls  and 
bears,  and  buys  and  sells,  and  dabbles  with  ly- 
ing loans,  and  trades  upon  state  secrets — what 
is  he  but  a  gamester?  The  merchant  who 
deals  in  teas  and  tallows,  is  he  any  better? 
His  bales  of  dirty  indigo  are  his  dice,  his  cards 
come  up  every  year  instead  of  every  ten  min- 
utes, and  the  sea  is  his  green-table — You  call 
the  profession  of  the  law  an  honourable  one, 
where  a  man  will  lie  for  any  bidder — lie  down 
poverty  for  the  sake  of  a  fee  from  wealth ;  lie 
down  right  because  wrong  is  in  his  brief. 
You  call  a  doctor  an  honourable  man, — a 
swindling  quack  who  does  not  believe  in  the 
nostrums  which  he  prescribes,  and  takes  your 
guinea  for  whispering  in  your  ear  that  it  is  a 
fine  morning.  And  yet,  forsooth,  a  gallant 
man,  who  sits  him  down  before  the  baize  and 
challenges  all  comers,  his  money  against  theirs, 
his  fortune  against  theirs,  is  proscribed  by  your 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      67 

modern  moral  world!  It  is  a  conspiracy  of 
the  middle  class  against  gentlemen.  It  is  only 
the  shopkeeper  cant  which  is  to  go  down  now- 
adays. I  say  that  play  was  an  institution  of 
chivalry.  It  has  been  wrecked  along  with 
other  privileges  of  men  of  birth.  When 
Seingalt  engaged  a  man  for  six  and  thirty 
hours  without  leaving  the  table,  do  you  think 
he  showed  no  courage?  How  have  we  had  the 
best  blood  and  the  brightest  eyes,  too,  of 
Europe  throbbing  round  the  table,  as  I  and 
my  uncle  have  held  the  cards  and  the  bank 
against  some  terrible  player,  who  was  match- 
ing some  thousands  out  of  his  millions  against 
our  all,  which  was  there  on  the  baize!  When 
we  engaged  that  daring  Alexis  Kossloffsky, 
and  won  seven  thousand  louis  on  a  single  coup, 
had  we  lost  we  should  have  been  beggars  the 
next  day;  when  he  lost,  he  was  only  a  village 
and  a  few  hundred  serfs  in  pawn  the  worse." 
The  career  of  this  audacious  poser,  whose 
real  name  was  plain  Barry,  begins  in  Ireland, 
where  his  family,  he  tells  us,  is  of  the  highest 
rank  and  seated  at  a  place  called  Barryville. 
As  a  mere  boy  he  reveals  that  heartless  addi- 
tion to  pose,  joined  with  absolute  selfishness 
and  a  boastful  faith  in  himself,  which  he  con- 
tinues to  -reveal  in  every  act  of  his  life.     His 


68       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

adventures  include  two  terms  of  service  as  a 
soldier — one  forced  upon  him  by  law  and 
terminated  by  his  desertion:  the  other  brought 
about  by  kidnappers  who  entrap  him  into  the 
army  of  Prussia — the  discovery  of  his  uncle, 
Chevalier  de  Balebari,  a  professional  gambler 
of  whom,  thereafter,  he  is  a  confederate:  a 
bold,  brilliant  and  abominable  course  in  the 
Duchy  of  X,  where  he  and  his  uncle  acquired 
influence  through  notes  accepted  by  them  at 
the  gaming  table,  and  where  they  laid  a  great 
scheme  to  force  a  marriage  between  Barry  and 
the  Countess  Ida,  a  scheme  that  failed  and  in- 
volved them  in  the  tragic  episode  of  Duke 
Victor  and  his  Duchess  because  of  which  they 
were  driven  from  the  duchy  and  wandered 
about  Europe;  at  last,  Barry  came  to  England 
and  made  a  match  with  the  widowed  Lady 
Lyndon  whose  name  he  assumed. 

From  the  moment  of  this  great  triumph  for 
the  adventurer,  his  star  begins  to  decline, 
which  fact  is  significant  of  the  mood  Thack- 
eray was  in  when  he  wrote  the  book.  I  have 
said  that  in  his  earlier  novels  the  gambler  and 
the  schemer  are  the  chief  human  causes  of  un- 
happiness.  There  is  another  cause,  in  those 
earlier  novels,  which  is  not  human.  It  is 
fate.     Later  on,  Thackeray  was  to  change  his 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY       69 

point  of  view;  the  inward  drama  was  to  in- 
clude a  victory  over  his  belief  in  fate;  but 
when  he  wrote  Barry  Lyndon,  that  time  had 
not  come.  In  1846  he  still  felt  that  a  malign 
fate  had  the  best  of  it  in  this  world.  There- 
fore, though  Barry  Lyndon,  like  an  evil  con- 
queror, rides  down  the  hearts  of  those  that 
trust  him,  he  is  all  the  while  going  straight 
into  the  shadow  of  a  giant  cloud  which  he,  in 
his  blindness,  cannot  see.  It  is  the  cloud  of 
Sorrow  which,  for  Thackeray,  at  thirty-five, 
overhung  the  world.  There  comes  a  time 
when  fate  turns  upon  Barry  Lyndon,  when  in 
spite  of  his  audacity,  all  the  fruits  of  his 
triumphs  disappear;  when  accident  dogs  him 
like  a  shadow ;  and  our  last  view  is  of  a  broken, 
dispirited,  unhappy  man  borne  down  by  all 
conquering  sorrow. 

Again,  as  in  connection  with  the  Snob 
Papers  we  should  notice  that  Thackeray  hits 
his  vein  artistically  in  the  vengeful  expression 
of  a  bitter  point  of  view.  But  again  we  are  im- 
pressed by  his  deficient  instinct  for  the  mat- 
ter, his  slight  understanding  of  his  audience. 
What  the  audience  would  take,  in  small  doses 
mixed  with  humour  in  the  Snob  Papers,  they 
rejected  without  conditions  when  presented  to 
them  in  a  great  mass  without  humour  to  sweet- 


70       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

en  it.  The  Snob  Papers  comprise  forty-four 
ironic  miniatures ;  each  one  portraying  a  single 
aspect  of  meanness.  The  Luck  of  Barry  Lyn- 
don forms  one  stupendous  monument.  The 
former  we  can  accept,  one  by  one,  without  feel- 
ing that  the  world  is  bad.  The  latter,  so  far 
as  subject  goes,  is  one  great  arch  of  darkness. 
To  care  for  it  we  must  be  able — either  by 
temperament  or  training — to  follow  Thack- 
eray at  his  desk  precisely  as  he  followed  J.  J. 
at  his  easel;  we  must  enter  into  the  difficulties 
of  the  undertaking;  estimate  with  accuracy  the 
forces  he  can  put  into  the  field;  comprehend 
the  generalship  with  which  he  uses  them. 
Few  people  read  books  in  this  way,  and  Barry 
Lyndon  was  submitted  to  an  audience  which 
was  peculiarly  incapable  of  doing  so.  It  was 
an  audience  which,  with  good  right,  was  grow- 
ing weary  of  the  prophets  of  despair,  and  was 
crying  out  either  to  be  amused  or  be  made 
hopeful.  Therefore  it  had  turned  to  the  in- 
flexible but  buoyant  Dickens,  who,  in  that 
weary  and  disillusioned  nineteenth  century 
was  the  literary  general  of  the  forces  of  hope. 
Therein  lay  the  secret  of  his  great  influence. 
He  was  really  a  gigantic  pamphleteer  who 
organised  the  cheerfulness  of  his  time  and  led 
an  assault  upon  the  citadel  of  despair.     When 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      71 

almost  every  one  else  was  hopeless ;  when  Car- 
lyle,  in  the  tones  of  an  expiring  tempest  was 
thundering  to  the  world  that  our  mission  is 
but  to  endure  and  die ;  when  Tennyson,  melo- 
diously miserable,  could  not  make  hope  ro- 
bust; when  all  the  voices  of  revolt  were  re- 
peating Shelley — 

''The  world  is  weary  of  the  past, 
Oh  might  it  die  or  rest  at  last — " 

when  all  this  was  going  on,  no  wonder  the 
average  man  valued  Dickens  as  he  valued  sun- 
shine, and  gave  little  heed  to  a  novelist  who 
had  not  yet  broken  away  from  the  wailing 
chorus  of  the  voices  of  woe,  whose  book  was 
a  despairing  epic  on  the  lordship  of  evil  over 
life,  the  lordship  of  Sorrow  over  all. 


CHAPTER  IV 

VANITY  FAIR 

IN  1846,  Thackeray  could  not  longer  en- 
dure the  separation  from  his  children. 
He  took  a  house,  13  Young  Street,  Ken- 
sington, brought  his  children  thither  and  went 
to  work  on  Vanity  Fair.  In  that  house,  dur- 
ing 1846  and  1847,  almost  all  of  the  book  was 
written. 

Though  Vanity  Fair  is  probably  the  chief 
support  of  his  reputation  with  the  general 
reader,  it  is  the  least  Thackerean,  in  certain 
respects,  of  all  his  books.  It  presents  several 
curious  problems,  of  which  the  most  obvious, 
and  also  the  easiest  to  solve,  is  the  presence 
of  two  distinct  sorts  of  humour.  One  we  rec- 
ognise as  Thackeray's  own ;  the  other  is  an  in- 
truder. It  is  so  well  marked,  however,  that 
we  have  no  trouble  determining  whence  it 
crept  into  the  fold.  The  influence  of  Dickens 
has  borne  fruit  and  it  is  Dickens'  humour 
which  is  the  alien  element  in  Vanity  Fair. 

To  characterise  either  sort  in  a  word,  or  a 

72 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      73 

phrase,  is  a  risky  matter.  And  yet,  if  one 
should  venture  to  do  so,  one  might  say  that 
the  humour  of  Dickens  is  pre-eminently  the 
humour  of  the  inconsequent.  In  Dickens  we 
get  inured  to  the  gymnastics  of  feeling,  we  see 
emotions  performing  on  the  high  wire,  we 
listen  to  the  roar  of  the  pit  and  grow  dizzy  at 
a  succession  of  lightening  transformations. 
An  idea  starts  out  in  a  guise  which  we  think 
we  recognise,  toward  a  goal  which  we  think  we 
see,  and  then — high  presto! — by  a  change  too 
quick  to  detect,  it  has  shuffled  into  another 
garb  and  we  must  grin  at  our  fooled  expecta- 
tions. 

In  the  true  Thackerean  humour  there  is 
something  which  is  harder  to  phrase.  Its  sur- 
prises are  not  inconsequent.  What  makes  us 
smile  is  not  the  sudden  capering  of  ideas  but, 
rather,  an  unforeseen  bathing  of  them  in 
strange  light.  One  is  forced  back  upon  the 
hackneyed  similitude  of  the  sunshine  rifting 
through  clouds.  But  like  a  certain  sort  of  ac- 
tual sunshine — whose  peculiar  brilliancy,  the 
gift  of  unf alien  rain,  has  in  it  something  wist- 
ful, something  prophetic  of  its  end — so  the  sun- 
shine of  Thackeray's  humour  glimmers  across 
unshed  tears. 

I  may  be  yielding  to  a  temptation  to  clear 


74       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

Thackeray  at  the  expense  of  Dickens,  but 
surely  it  was  not  Thackeray's  true  self  that 
sprinkled  Vanity  Fair  with  its  bad  puns.  It 
was  not  the  Thackeray  of  the  XXXth  chapter 
who  wrote  "what  is  the  rack  in  the  punch  at 
night  to  the  rack  in  the  head  of  a  morning?" 
Dickens  for  all  his  greatness — and  we  should 
be  on  our  guard  nowadays  to  see  justice  done 
him — was  capable  of  just  that.  What  Dickens 
never  could  have  done,  what  is  Thackeray's 
normal  vein,  is  such  a  remark  as  the  delicious 
sneer,  "it  was  only  by  her  French  being  so 
good  that  you  could  know  she  was  not  a  born 
woman  of  fashion."  Furthermore,  at  many 
places  in  Vanity  Fair,  there  is  something  not 
like  the  best  of  Thackeray  in  the  choice  of 
place  for  the  introduction  of  burlesque. 
Many  a  time  when  we  wish  to  come  up  square 
against  fact  and  see  the  subject  through  our 
own  eyes,  the  author  intervenes  and  plays  the 
part  of  a  talking  showman — as  Dickens  does — 
revealing  to  us  not  fact  but  an  exaggerated 
version  of  it  intended  to  be  funny.  A  typical 
example  is  the  introduction  to  the  reader  of 
Amelia  Sedley  who  "could  not  only  sing  like 
a  lark,  or  a  Mrs.  Billington,  and  dance  like  a 
Hillisberg  or  Parisot;  and  embroider  beauti- 
fully; and  spell  as  well  as  a  dictionary  itself; 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      75 

but  she  had  such  a  kindly,  smiling,  tender, 
gentle,  generous  heart  of  her  own,  as  won  the 
love  of  everybody  who  came  near  her  from 
Minerva  herself  down  to  the  poor  girl  in  the 
scullery  and  the  one-eyed  tart  woman's 
daughter,  who  was  permitted  to  vend  her  wares 
once  a  week  to  the  young  ladies  of  the  Mall. 
She  had  twelve  intimate  and  bosom  friends 
out  of  twenty-four  young  ladies." 

No  amount  of  writing  such  as  this  can  make 
us  sure  that  we  have  looked  Amelia  in  the 
face.  This  is  not  portraiture  but  burlesque, 
not  Thackeray  but  Dickens.  It  is  worth  no- 
ticing, however,  that  this  vein  gradually  wears 
out  as  the  book  progresses.  Emmy  enters 
upon  the  scene  as  a  puppet  from  the  tiring 
room  of  Dickens  but  in  the  course  of  the  per- 
formance she  gradually  becomes  alive  and  by 
the  time  she  makes  her  final  exit  she  is  a  human 
being. 

In  the  first  two-thirds  of  the  book,  at  least, 
it  would  seem  as  if  Thackeray,  having 
awakened  to  his  need  of  a  model,  had  accepted 
Dickens  without  discriminating  between  his 
strength  and  his  weakness.  Perhaps  this  very 
lack  of  discrimination  helped  Vanity  Fair 
with  the  crowd,  for  its  laughable  characters 
are  sketched  in  those  broad  outlines  so  dear 


76        THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAJVIA  IN 

to  the  lover  of  Dickens.  One  hesitates  to  say 
that  dear  old  Peggy  O'Dowd  is  a  closer  kins- 
woman of  Dickens  than  Thackeray;  and  yet, 
when  one  reflects  how  uniform  is  the  impres- 
sion produced  by  her,  how  close  she  comes  to 
being  an  embodied  characteristic,  how  con- 
sistent she  is,  one  cannot  but  recall  the  method 
of  portraiture  of  such  an  immortal  bit  of 
grotesque  as,  say,  Mrs.  Harris.  When  we 
look  at  some  other  of  Thackeray's  feminine 
types,  at  Lady  Jane,  for  example,  are  we  quite 
persuaded  that  Mrs.  Nickleby  herself  does  not 
hide  among  their  dresses  at  the  back  of  a 
closet?  Certainly,  when  w^e  contrast  Mrs. 
O'Dowd,  or  Lady  Jane,  with  such  a  typical 
Thackerean  as  old  Miss  Crawley,  the  difiPer- 
ence  in  the  temper  and  the  method  of  delinea- 
tion is  not  to  be  denied.  The  two  former,  how- 
ever Thackeray  came  by  them,  are  of  the 
school  of  Dickens;  the  latter,  like  a  piece  of 
nature,  transcends  all  schools  and  is  Thack- 
eray's own. 

And  yet,  in  certain  respects,  the  school  of 
Dickens  was  just  what  Thackeray  needed,  for 
Dickens,  the  supreme  story  teller,  was  espe- 
cially strong  in  those  directions  where  Thack- 
eray was  most  weak.  The  knack  of  putting 
events  together  so  as  to  form  what  will  be 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      77 

called  by  the  general  reader  a  '^good  story"  is 
the  main  secret  of  popular  success  and  Thack= 
eray  managed  to  do  so  just  once.  Vanity  Fair 
is  a  ''good  story" — a  good  story  of  the  school  of 
Dickens.  \ 

•^"Tt  is  worth  our  while  to  observe  the  mere 
/  method  by  which  the  story  is  told.  Becky,  of 
I  course  is  the  central  figure  and  Amelia  serves 
>  to  illuminate  her  by  contrast.  The  book  opens 
with  Becky's  first  matrimonial  campaign  in 
which  under  the  protection  of  ineffectual  little  ' 
Amelia  she  lays  seige  to  Amelia's  hulking 
fool  of  a  brother,  Jos  Sedley.  Her  scheme 
is  foiled  by  Captain  George  Osborne  for  / 
no  reason  but  that  he  expects  to  marry/ 
Amelia  and  looks  on  Becky  as  an  ad- 
venturess to  whom  he  does  not  care  to  be 
related.  Captain  William  Dobbin  also  had  a 
hand  in  pulling  Sedley  out  of  danger.  At  the 
very  start  we  see  that  Captain  Dobbin  is  in  love 
with  Amelia;  Captain  Osborne,  in  love  only 
with  himself;  while  Amelia  is  in  love  with 
Love.  Becky  is  entirely  the  mistress  of  her 
emotions.  By  the  failure  of  this  first  cam- 
paign the  group  of  people  who  were  in  sight 
as  the  curtain  rose  is  broken  up.  Becky  goes 
to  Queens  Crawley  to  be  a  governess  there 
while  Amelia  remains  at  her  home  in  Russell 


78       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 


.j^ 


Square.  For  a  time  we  pass  back  and  forth 
between  these  two  portions  of  the  original 
group,  and  presently  we  are  aware  that  in  both 
portions  the  same  event  is  coming  forward.  ^ 
Before  long  it  occurs.  (^Each  girl  by  her  mar- >A; 
riage  sets  her  husband  in  opposition  to  tryan- 
nic  selfishness  and  so  loses  him  a  fortune. 
Becky  marries  that  famous  buck,  Rawdon 
Crawley,  who  is  thereupon  disinherited  by  his 
aunt,  rich  old  Miss  Crawley;  Amelia  marries 
George,  whose  father  has  quarrelled  with  old 
Sedley  and  now  wishes  to  break  ofT  the  match. 
George,  having  resisted  his  father,  is  also  dis- 
inherited. Major  Dobbin,  silently  devoted  to 
Amelia,  takes  a  chief  part  in  bringing  her  mar- 
riage about. 

Now  occurs  an  episode  in  which  the  leading 
persons  of  the  original  group  again  come  to- 
gether and  the  duel  of  the  opening  episode  is 
repeated  with  a  variation.  As  both  girls  have 
married  soldiers  there  is  nothing  forced  in 
bringing  them  together  at  Brussels  on  the  eve 
of  Waterloo.  We  should  remember  here  that 
in  the  opening  episode  Becky  was  driven  ofif 
the  field  by  George.  At  Brussels  she  again  at- 
tacks him  but  with  a  new  purpose.  Since  her 
defeat  at  his  hands  she  has  become  an  artful 
campaigner  and  has  married  a  blackguard. 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      79 

George,  in  love  only  with  himself,  is  alreadyV 
tired  of  his  child  wife,  and  Becky  flirts  him  un- 
der her  thumb  while  her  husband  fleeces  him 
at  cards.  George  proposes  to  run  off  with  her, 
and  only  his  death  at  Waterloo  saves  Amelia 
from  knowing.  Thus  Becky  gets  her  first  re*'/ 
venge.  .y 

Again  the  group  breaks  up  and  again  we 
are  kept  in  touch  with  both  fragments.  But 
this  time,  instead  of  reflecting  they  contrast 
each  other.  ForJ>oth  women,  Waterloo  was 
the  crisis.  Becky  lefFErussels' confident  in  the 
powej3)f2her"  arts  and  bent  upon  being  a 
woman  of  fashion,  come  what  might.  Ame- 
lia, whose  people  had  been  ruined  by  the  war, 
absorbed  herself  in  the  attempt — not  always 
well  directed,  for  she  was  not  a  very  wise  lit- 
tle person — to  do  her  duty. 

In  each  life,  however,  there  was  repeated 
that  same  duel  with  tyrannic  selfishness  in 
whrch  both  women  became  involved  when 
they  were  married.  /^Becky,  after  Waterloo, 
matched  her  wits  against  the  great  Marquis 
of  Steyne  with  whom  she  sought  to  deal  as 
previously  with  George  Osborne.  Amelia 
was  challenged  by  another  brutal  egoist,  her 
husband's  father,  for  possession  of  her  boy. 
In  both  cases  the  egoist  won.     Becky  missed  it 


80       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IX 

with  Steyne;  was  found  out  by  Rawdon;  and 
disappeared  from  view.  Amelia,  to  save  her 
child  from  poverty,  gave  him  up  to  his  grand- 
father. 

In  course  of  time  Dobbin,  whose  love  for 
Amelia  was  as  faithful  as  ever,  came  back 
from  India  where  he  had  been  in  service, 
bringing  Jos  with  him,  and  Amelia's  fortunes 
began  to  mend.  After  awhile  old  Osborne 
died  and  Amelia  and  her  son  were  reunited. 
Still  Dobbin  loved  Amelia  and  Amelia  went 
on  loving  Love  to  which  she  gave  the  face  of 
George.  At  last  all  these  made  a  trip  to  Ger- 
many and  at  the  little  town  of  Pumpernickel 
whom  should  they  come  upon  but  Becky. 
Though  holding  to  the  fringe  of  respectability 
with  a  somewhat  doubtful  clutch  she  was  still 
unalterably  herself,  still  delightfully  undis- 
mayed, and  at  once  she  resumed  her  influence 
over  Amelia.  Here,  then,  for  the  third  time 
we  have  the  original  group  and  as  the  episode 
progresses  the  original  issues — with  final  vari- 
ations— are  repeated.  Again  there  is  the  duel 
between  Becky  and  George,  this  time  for  the 
deliverance  of  Amelia  from  his  memory. 
Becky  gets  her  crowning  vengeance  when  by 
revealing  George's  perfidy  at  Brussels,  she  at 
last  opens  Amelia's  eyes  and  thus  the  reign  of 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      81 

that  false  saint  is  ended.  However,  Amelia 
had  already  discovered  where  she  really  stood 
and  Dobbin  was  even  then  upon  his  way  to 
claim  her.  The  only  remaining  issue  is  the 
matter  of  Becky  and  Jos.  The  schemes  which 
had  failed  long  years  before  bear  some  sort 
of  fruit  at  the  end  of  the  book  and  when  we  / 
see  Jos  last  he  is  wholly  under  Becky's  influ/ 
ence. 

The  materials  of  the  book  have  caused  much 
discussion.  Mrs.  Ritchie  is  uncertain  whether 
any  particular  person  sat  for  the  portrait  of 
Becky.  She  more  than  half  suspects,  how- 
ever, that  she  once  had  a  glimpse  of  Becky's 
original  and  writes  of  her  thus:  ''One  morn- 
ing a  hansom  drove  up  to  the  door  and  out 
of  it  there  emerged  the  most  charming,  daz- 
zling little  lady  dressed  in  black,  who  greeted 
my  father  with  great  affection  and  brilliancy, 
and  who,  departing  presently,  gave  my  father 
a  large  bunch  of  fresh  violets."  At  one  time 
an  absurd  tale  went  about  to  the  effect  that 
Becky  was  Charlotte  Bronte,  and  that  Miss 
Bronte,  to  get  even,  pictured  Thackeray  in  her 
character  of  Rochester.  This  was  mere  non- 
sense on  both  counts.  If  we  are  to  find  a  lit- 
erary portrait  of  Thackeray,  dating  from  1847, 
we  must  look  for  it  in  his  own  book.     And 


82       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IX 

though  we  are  told  that  in  John  Allen,  Arch- 
deacon of  Salop,  Thackeray  got  a  hint  for 
Dobbin,  surely  upon  this  point  there  is  more 
to  say.  One  must  be  near  blindness  not  to 
see  that  if  we  subtract  the  genius  from  Wil- 
liam Thackeray  as  he  was  at  thirty-seven  and 
add  a  few  disguises  like  big  feet  and  an  awk- 
ward manner  we  have  a  large  part  of  the  ma- 
terial of  the  patient  major.  Of  Amelia, 
Thackeray  said  that  he  got  hints  of  her  from 
"his  wife,  his  mother  and  Mrs.  Brookfield." 
The  two  persons  in  Vanity  Fair  whose  origin 
is  generally  supposed  to  be  established  are 
Lord  Steyne  and  his  parasite  Mr.  Wenham. 

The  former  is  supposed  to  have  been  studied 
from  the  Marquis  of  Hertford.  That  sin- 
gular nobleman  was  a  person  of  much  more 
versatility  than  Lord  Steyne  but  in  many 
respects  their  careers  are  identical.  Like 
Steyne,  Hertford  was  a  gambler,  both  shrewd 
and  daring;  an  abandoned  sensualist,  incapa- 
ble of  permanent  attachment  to  any  creature; 
an  unscrupulous  egoist,  overshadowed  by  the 
dread  of  inherited  insanity.  On  the  other 
hand  when  Lord  Hertford  was  decorated  with 
the  Garter,  Sir  Robert  Peel  wrote,  ^T  was 
really  pleased  at  Lord  Hertford  getting  the 
garter.     I  was   pleased  very  disinterestedly, 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      83 

and  for  his  own  sake,  merely,  for  I  like  him. 
He  is  a  gentleman,  and  not  an  everyday  one." 
The  Duke  of  Wellington  said  of  him  that 
"had  Hertford  lived  in  London  instead  of 
frittering  away  his  time  in  Paris,  he  would 
have  become  Prime  Minister  of  England."  \ 
Plainly  there  was  a  brilliant  and  attractive 
side  to  this  vicious  nobleman  which  Thack- 
eray omitted  in  composing  Steyne.     Taking  , 
only  the  bad  side  of  Hertford,  Thackeray  has  j 
reared  upon  that  base  a  colossal  image  of  the  ( 
brutal   selfishness   of  the  tyrannic  male.     A 
heavy,  dominant,  ruthless,  heartless,  dictato- 
rial,    self-indulgent,     overbearing     despot — 
Steyne!     It  is  this  dreadful  personality,  the 
Prince  of  E^oists^  who  for  Thackeray  at  thir- 
ty-seven was  the  lord  of  the  world.     In  him 
all  the  evils  of  egoism  culminated  making  a 
vast  symbol   of  successful  selfishness  which 
might  well  be  called  Beelzebub.  ^ 

According  to  report  another  famous  egoist, 
Disraeli's  Monmouth  was  also  studied  from 
Lord  Hertford.  Mr.  Whibley,  ever  ready  to 
cast  a  stone  at  Thackeray,  undertakes  to  show 
that  Disraeli's  portrait  is  far  the  more  suc- 
cessful, and  would  dispose  of  Steyne  as  be- 
ing chiefly  "a  matter  of  buck  teeth"  and  bad 
manners.     There  is  some  truth  in  the  sneer. 


84       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

The  lover  of  Thackeray  would  like  to  have 
Steyne  less  a  monster,  more  a  merely  wicked 
human.  But  Mr.  Whibley  need  not  have 
gone  out  of  his  way  to  produce  a  rival  to 
Steyne  and  by  implication  set  Disraeli  in 
higher  place.  If  we  turn  from  Steyne  to 
Thackeray's  later  version  of  the  same  idea,  to 
Lord  Ringwood,  in  Philip,  we  see  that  with 
time  the  melodramatic  in  Thackeray  disap- 
peared. Again,  the  real  explanation  is  sim- 
ply that  in  Vanity  Fair  he  is  always  near  the 
shadow  of  Dickens.  That  shadow  is  coming 
and  going  everywhere  across  the  book  and  at 
times  falls  heavily  upon  the  figure  of  Steyne. 
To  pass  from  the  Marquis  to  his  creature, 
we  come  to  another  of  Mr.  Whibley's  op- 
portunities. In  Coningsby,  Disraeli  drew  a 
portrait  labelled  Nicholas  Rigby,  which  is 
really  a  study  of  John  Wilson  Croker,  who 
was  also  the  original  of  Wenham  in  Vanity 
Fair,  ''While  Steyne  is  overshadowed  by 
Monmouth,"  writes  Mr.  Whibley,  ''Wenham 
is  completely  eclipsed  by  Rigby."  He  de- 
votes five  and  a  half  pages  to  the  relative  mer- 
its of  the  three  persons,  Croker,  Rigby  and 
Wenham,  always  with  an  eye  to  the  disparage- 
ment of  Thackeray.  When  we  recall  that 
Wenham    is   a   very   minor   character,    very 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      85 

lightly  sketched;  that  he  emerges  into  promi- 
nence only  once,  and  then  merely  as  agent  of 
Steyne  to  smooth  things  over  with  Mrs.  Craw- 
ley's husband ;  it  is  hard  to  see  why  Mr.  Whib- 
ley  should  make  so  much  pother  about  him. 
Perhaps  we  are  tempted  by  an  uncharitable 
suspicion  that  Mr.  Whibley,  like  so  many  of 
the  seekers  after  "origins,"  is  betrayed  in  mak- 
ing much  of  trifling  discoveries  not  because 
they  throw  light  on  Thackeray  but  because 
they  show  the  cleverness  of  the  trifler.  In 
fact  Mr.  Whibley  gives  his  hand  away  and 
cuts  the  ground  from  beneath  his  feet  by  two 
incautious  sentences.  He  says  of  Wenham, 
"the  portrait  in  brief,  has  neither  the  force 
nor  the  rascality  which  distinguish  Mr.  Nich- 
olas Rigby,  the  villain  of  Coningsby,  after 
whom  rather  than  after  nature  it  seems  to 
have  been  drawn."  Again  he  says,  "Thack- 
eray, when  he  sketched  Wenham,  had  in  his 
mind's  eye  the  conventional  portrait  of  John 
Wilson  Croker."  Had  Mr.  Whibley  been 
seeking  disinterestedly  to  form  an  estimate  of 
Thackeray,  these  remarks,  with  perhaps  an- 
other or  two,  would  have  served  his  turn. 
But  his  animus  will  not  let  him  rest.  Though 
he  declares  that  Wenham  is  drawn  "after  Rig- 
by  rather  than  after  nature,"  and  that  in  doing 


86       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

so  Thackeray  used  a  ''conventional  portrait," 
he  goes  on  to  cry  Thackeray  down  because 
he  did  not  see  fit  to  make  a  study  of  the  re- 
mote original  from  which  this  conventional 
portrait  derived.  The  truth  of  the  matter  is 
simply  that  Thackeray,  in  a  novel  of  sixty- 
seven  chapters,  introduces  a  character  whose 
function  is  to  be  in  sight  around  the  edge  of 
the  scene,  do  a  single  mean  act  and  figure 
prominently  in  just  one  chapter.  In  so  slight 
a  part  Thackeray  can  afford  to  imitate  Shake- 
speare, as  well  as  almost  every  other  novelist 
and  playw^right  that  ever  lived,  and  without 
troubling  himself  to  create  a  character,  use  a 
stock  type.  He  does  so.  The  same  stock 
property  had  been  used  shortly  before  by  an- 
other brilliant  novelist  ''after  whom  rather 
than  after  nature,"  Thackeray's  sketch  seems 
to  have  been  drawn. 

Setting  aside  these  comparatively  small 
ones  among  the  problems  presented  by  Vanity 
Fair  we  approach  another  which  is  not  small. 
How  are  we  to  account  for  the  buoyant  tone 
of  the  book?  Why  is  it  that  Vanity  Fair, 
coming  right  on  the  heels  of  Barry  Lyndon, 
that  masterpiece  of  dreariness,  has  a  dash  and 
"go"  that  sweeps  us  along  irresistibly? 

There  is  nothing  in  Thackeray's  personal 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      87. 

life  to  account  for  the  accession  of  spirit  that 
enlivens  Vanity  Fair,  He  was  still  lonely  to 
an  extreme.  He  still  brooded  upon  life  with 
the  same  passionate  appreciation  of  its  evil 
and  its  sorrow.  When  we  look  close  into  Van- 
ity Fair  we  perceive  that  its  buoyancy  does 
not  rest  on  that  part  of  the  book  in  which  the 
mere  man  as  distinguished  from  the  craftsman 
is  revealed.  In  this  case  Dickens  did  not  in- 
fluence him  and  the  contrast  with  Dickens 
helps  us  toward  a  clue,  for  the  buoyancy 
which  we  find  in  Dickens  is  based  upon  that 
part  of  him  which  lies  beneath  the  artist,  on 
the  man's  personal  conviction  of  what  life  sig- 
nifies, his  conviction  that  in  the  long  run 
things  somehow  straighten  themselves  out; 
that  though  God  works  in  a  mysterious  way, 
still,  even  in  this  life,  God  is  here  helping  us 
inscrutably  toward  our  salvation.  But  in 
Vanity  Fair  all  the  underlying  conviction  as 
to  how  things  happen  in  life  is  either  hope- 
less or  ironical.  Episode  after  episode, 
though  we  have  laughed  over  it  as  it  pro- 
gressed, ends  in  failure.  Even  the  end  of  all, 
the  glimpse  we  get  of  Dobbin  and  Amelia 
married,  is  unsatisfying.  It  hints  that  Dob- 
bin did  not  rise  to  our  expectations.  The  very 
last  we  hear  of  Amelia  is  a  sigh.     And  the 


88       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

book  ends  with  those  famous  but — even 
though  Thackeray  wrote  them — unmanly 
words:  ^'Ah!  Vanitas  Vanitatum!  which  of 
us  is  happy  in  this  world?  Which  of  us  has 
his  desire?  or,  having  it,  is  satisfied? — Come, 
children,  let  us  shut  up  the  box  and  the  pup- 
pets, for  our  play  is  played  out." 

No,  the  buoyancy  of  Vanity  Fair  is  not  a 
matter  of  the  point  of  view.  We  are  still  in 
the  second  act  of  Thackeray's  spiritual  drama, 
and  not  yet  is  there  light  in  his  darkened 
heaven.  In  order  to  reach  the  secret  of  the 
buoyancy  we  must  leave  for  the  moment  the 
ordinary  way  of  looking  at  a  novel  and  take 
up  something,  at  least,  of  Thackeray's  own  at- 
titude toward  J.  J.  We  must  turn  back  to 
Barry  Lyndon,  put  its  subject  out  of  our  heads 
and  look  at  it  purely  as  a  piece  of  style.  Hav- 
ing once  brought  ourselves  to  this  point  of 
view  we  shall  be  startled  by  the  impression 
which  we  receive.  We  shall  become  aware, 
throughout  that  stern  book,  of  a  rising  tide  of 
artistic  self-confidence  which  before  we  had 
missed.  We  see  now,  that  as  Thackeray  went 
forward  with  that  great  undertaking  he  dis- 
covered his  powers;  as  difficulty  after  diffi- 
culty went  down  before  him,  routed  horse  and 
foot,  he  came  first  to  believe  in,  and  then  to 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      89 

exult  in,  his  artistic  destiny.  To  take  a  meta- 
phor from  the  life  of  Napoleon,  Barry  Lyn- 
don was  Thackeray's  campaign  in  Italy. 

We  now  have  the  secret  of  the  buoyancy  of 
Vanity  Fair.  It  is  the  sheer  *'joy  of  the  work- 
ing," that  first  enthusiasm  over  his  own  initia- 
tion into  technical  mastery,  which  has  come  to 
every  great  artist  at  a  certain  point  in  his 
career;  has  made  distinctive  w^hat  the  critics 
call  his  ''first  manner";  and  then  has  left  him. 
In  the  case  of  Thackeray  this  discovery  of  a 
technical  enthusiasm  must  have  had  double 
significance,  because,  for  the  moment,  it  must 
have  delivered  him  from  himself.  In  the  na- 
ture of  things  the  "joy  of  the  w^orking" — in 
this  limited  sense — cannot  last  very  long  for 
the  charm  of  it  is  based  upon  surprise,  but 
while  it  lasts  it  is  one  of  the  most  powerful 
stimulants  in  the  world.  If  the  evidence  of 
the  mere  writing  counts  for  anything,  Thack- 
eray worked  this  stimulant  to  the  full  in 
Vanity  Fair. 

It  is  this  buoyancy  of  the  mere  craftsman 
which  permeates  the  book;  which  moves 
everywhere  as  if  in  flashes  of  light  among 
those  stern  ideas  which  still  remain  fixed  in 
Thackeray's  mind,  which  the  joy  of  the  work- 
ing is  powerless  to  change,  but  around  which 


90       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

it  spins  an  illusory  atmosphere  of  flashes. 
Thus  it  comes  about  that  when  we  have 
learned  to  see  through  this  brilliant  elffect  of 
style — for  that  is  all  it  is — we  see  that  the  stern 
ideas  are  still  there  in  unchanged  grimness 
and  only  to  our  dazzled  eyes  have  their  out- 
lines appeared  to  be  softened — like  ugly  things 
beautified  by  dawn.  We  see  that  here,  just 
as  truly  as  in  Barry  Lyndon,  colossal  egoism 
dominates  the  scene.  We  see  goodness  linked 
always  with  futility;  evil,  splendid  and  trium- 
phant; and  over  all,  Sorrow  like  an  emperor. 
The  very  heart  of  the  book  is  in  that  final 
cry,  "which  of  us  is  happy  in  this  world?" 

Having  trained  our  eyes  so  that  we  can  see 
clearly  through  the  dawn  shimmer  of  the  style 
of  Vanity  Fair,  we  perceive  within  that  shim- 
mer a  procession  of  egoists  who  incarnate  the 
mercilessness  of  fate.  The  procession  opens 
with  George  Osborne,  who  is  followed  by  that 
larger  edition  of  the  same  thing,  his  repulsive 
father;  behind  them  come  the  two  Crawleys, 
Pitt  and  his  Aunt;  alongside  whom  moves  the 
detestable  Mrs.  Bute  Crawley  and  her  drink- 
ing husband;  and  the  odious  Lord  and  Lady 
Bareacres;  until  the  series  culminates  in  the 
great  Steyne. 

They  are  all  described  so  aptly,  with  such 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      91 

graceful  deliberation — as  if  the  writer  thought 
of  nothing  but  how  to  phrase  them — that  we 
catch  for  the  moment  his  apparent  detachment 
and  forget  to  think  upon  their  significance. 
When,  however,  we  grow  familiar  with  the 
phrasing,  the  question  of  significance  asserts 
itself,  and  then  we  catch  the  tune  to  which  the 
procession  moves.  It  is  a  dead  march  wailing, 
^Which  of  us  is  happy  in  this  world?"  And 
the  dead  march  is  not  merely  over  the  victims 
whom  the  colossi  trample  beneath  their  feet. 
The-Cgoists  themselves  are  no  happier  than 
the  rest.  Air^re  chasing  ar-will-o^-the-wisp. 
''Which  of  us  has  his  desire?"  is  the  dirge  for 
the^iallen,  blending  immediately  with  the  re- 
quiem over  the  victors — "or  having  it  is  satis- 
fied ?^'2 

Were  it  not  that  we  catch  from  the  author 
some  portion  of  his  own  joy  of  the  working, — 
which  is  here  so  potent  that  it  infects  us  with- 
out our  being  aware, — this  procession  of  the 
egoists  would  be  intolerable.  That  same  in- 
fection is  all  that  enables  us  to  look  calmly 
upon  the  fallen.  When  we  strip  them  of  the 
wonderful  style  by  which  they  are  enrobed 
we  are  tempted  to  say  they  come  nearer,  even 
than  the  egoists,  to  being  Thackeray's  con- 
demnation.    Every  one  of  them  lacks  either 


92       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAJVIA  IN 

force  or  charm.  Not  one  of  them  has  any 
appreciable  effect  upon  the  course  of  events. 
The  battle  of  life  rides  over  them  and  goes  on 
and  they  are  left  among  the  lumber.  Amelia, 
Dobbin,  the  poor  old  Sedleys,  neglected  Lady 
Steyne,  persecuted  Lady  Gaunt,  kindly  Lady 
Jane,  even  great  hearted  Peggy  O'Dowd  and 
her  brave  Mick,  are  all  ineffectual.  Imagine 
w^hat  Vanity  Fair  w^ould  be,  were  Dobbin 
withdrawn  from  it  and  in  his  place  put  a 
strong,  vehement  and  intrepid  goodness — a 
man  as  bold  as  Steyne.  Unfortunately,  for 
Thackeray,  at  thirty-seven,  that  could  not  be. 
People  to  be  loved,  to  be  protected,  to  be  wept 
over,  but  not  to  be  relied  upon  beyond  a  cer- 
tain point,  are  the  goodnesses  of  Vanity  Fair, 
Not  among  them  is  the  courage  that  burns  its 
ships,  the  intense  concentration  that  goes  blind 
to  its  own  peril,  the  indomitable  energy  whose 
recoil  when  it  is  denied  an  outlet  spells  de- 
struction. Steyne,  evil  as  he  was,  had  some- 
thing of  these  qualities.  Dobbin  with  all  his 
virtues  had  none  of  them. 

But  to  resume  upon  the  ''joy  of  the  work- 
ing." The  final  monument  of  it,  the  real  rea- 
son why  Vanity  Fair  survives,  is  yet  to  be 
named.  It  is  well  at  this  point  to  turn  our 
eyes  for  an  instant  to  that  earlier,  happier, 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      98 

more  triumphant  artist,  to  Shakespeare.  In 
him  we  discern  the  clear  limits  of  a  ''first  man- 
ner." We  mark  off  that  period  in  his  life 
when  he  like  Thackeray  was  intoxicated  by  his 
own  power  to  do  things.  We  see  how  the 
throb  of  his  joy,  seeking  a  perfect  vehicle  for 
its  expression,  singled  out  and  made  immortal 
that  part  of  himself  which  was  most  in  tune 
with  it.  The  result  was  one  of  the  greatest 
love  poems  ever  written.  To  the  measureless 
good  fortune  of  all  after  time,  Shakes- 
peare, in  his  first  manner,  had  still  an 
unclouded  heaven,  he  devoutly  believed 
in  Love,  was  not  the  least  afraid  of  Death, 
and  had  an  almost  boyish  faith  in  the  final 
rightness  of  everything.  Therefore,  his  first 
manner  culminates  in  Juliet. 

How  different  was  Thackeray's  mood  we 
have  seen.  But  he,  also,  like  Shakespeare,  like 
every  great  artist  in  this  stage  of  his  develop- 
ment, longed  to  fashion  a  creature  who  should 
incarnate  the  great  qualities  that  were  just  then 
active  in  himself.  To  do  so,  it  was  necessary 
that  he  find  a  character  of  a  sort  he  could  be- 
lieve in,  whose  wrestle  with  life  was  as  daunt- 
less as  his  own  wrestle  with  artistic  difficulties. 
Had  he  been  happy,  had  he  been  Shakespeare, 
he  would  have  found  in  his  memory  some^ 


94        THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

glorious  figure  of  unfaltering  love;  had  he 
been  bravely  sad — which  alas!  we  must  admit 
he  was  not — his  memory  would  have  yielded 
to  him  some  image  of  noble  sacrifice.  Being 
what  he  was,  he  found  an  image  in  which  the 
buoyancy,  the  audacity,  the  fortitude,  of  the 
artist  were  translated,  neither  into  love  nor 
sacrifice,  but  into  worldliness.  He  named 
this  image  Becky  Sharp. 

And  what  a  wonderful  image  it  is!  How 
gallantly  the  little  adventuress  matched  her 
wits  against  the  world.  With  what  courage 
she  went  alone  on  her  campaigns!  How 
firmly  sheT^ept  lip  her  spirits.  Never  once  did 
she  falter.  Defeat  could  not  break  her  down. 
Fearless,  gay,  self-reliant,  she  wrote  "fortune 
my  foe!"  on  her  banner,  and  when  everything 
she  cared  for  was  on  the  cast,  played  her  hand 
without  trembling.  The  cards  were  always 
against  her;  the  advantage  of  the  ground  was 
always  with  the  other  side;  in  none  of  her 
greater  campaigns  did  she  have  an  ally;  al- 
ways her  enemies  had  enormous  odds;  and 
yet,  not  once  did  she  lose  heart.  And  her 
equanimity  never  rested  on  indififerenceX^She 
is  one  of  the  most  tense  characters  in  fiction. 
The  bow  is  strung  every  minute  of  her  career. 
No  general  in  the  midst  of  a  great  campaign, 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      95 

no  politician  when  the  fate  of  his  party  is  in 
the  balance,  no  lover  who  is  engrossed  in  his 
passion,  could  pursue  an  ideal  with  more  un- 
compromising devotion.  With  the  ardour  of  a 
true  lover  she  saw  in  her  mind's  eye  the  sub- 
stance of  things  hoped  for;  with  the  courage 
of  a  great  soldier  she  went  gallantly  to  the  at- 
tack, laughing  at  her  immense  disadvantage; 
with  the  heroism  of  a  strong  mind  she  forbade 
herself  a  single  instant  of  the  luxury  of  self- 

"■^nd  now  for  the  other  side  of  the  picture: 
if  only  Becky  could  have  been  good!  Or,  to 
come  at  it  the  other  way  round,  think  what 
Vanity  Fair  would  be  did  some  of  its  good 
people  share  her  power.  Think  of  Dobbin 
with  Becky's  audacity;  Amelia  with  Becky's 
charm. 

Yes,  and  think  what  Becky  herself  might 
have  been  had  fortune  been  on  her  side;  think 
of  the  part  she  might  have  played  as  a  grande 
dame.  Her  intuitive  sense  of  proportion,  her 
natural  delicacy — I  had  almost  said  her  nat- 
ural purity — her  courage,  her  amiability,  her 
lack  of  malice,  her  poise,  her  serenity,  her 
charm — these  are  what  we  should  have  known 
in  Becky  had  she  changed  places  in  youth  with, 
say.  Lady  Mary  Caerlyon.     Had  she,  and  not 


96      THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY 

that  sweet  futility  become  the  Marchioness  of 
Steyne  we  should  be  celebrating  to-day,  the 
skill,  the  audacity,  the  devotion,  with  which 
she  played  her  husband's  hand  and  at  last  made 
him  a  Duke  and  Prime  Minister. 

But  in  Vanity  Fair,  this  cannot  be.  Here, 
nothing  must  go  right.  Becky,  the  supreme 
opportunist,  can  be  a  good  woman  on  ten  thou- 
sand a  year  but  has  not  the  stuff  to  be  good  in 
adversity.  Therefore,  she  must  have  adversity 
for  her  portion  so  that  Life  may  break  and  ruin 
her,  for  such  is  the  function  of  life  in  Vanity 
Fair.  The  constant  limitation  in  Thackeray's 
first  manner  is  the  obligation  in  his  own  mind 
to  make  everybody  fail.  He  will  not  spare 
his  most  brilliant  creation,  not  even  this 
"dauntless  worldling"  whose  wealth  of  sheer 
courage  is  the  chief  factor  in  keeping  his  book 
alive.  When  everything  has  been  allowed  for, 
and  we  come  to  the  conclusion  of  the  whole 
matter,  we  find  that  it  is  this :  Vanity  Fair  is  a 
great  but  mournful  symphony  built  in  every 
part  on  the  one  theme,  ''Which  of  us  is  happy 
in  this  world ?'^ 


CHAPTER  V 

END  OF  THE  FIRST  MANNER 

THE  custom  of  issuing  novels  in 
monthly  numbers  had  been  made 
popular  by  Dickens  and  was  followed 
by  Thackeray.  The  first  number  of  Vanity 
Fair  appeared  in  January,  1847;  the  last  one 
in  July,  1848.  The  tradition  is  that  he  re- 
ceived fifty  guineas  a  number. 

Vanity  Fair  did  not  immediately  capture  its 
audience  and  the  opening  numbers  were  neg- 
lected. Very  soon,  however,  its  great  quali- 
ties began  to  be  appreciated.  In  September, 
1847,  Mrs.  Carlyle  wrote  to  her  husband  that 
it  was  'Very  good  indeed"  and  ''beats  Dickens 
out  of  the  world."  In  January,  1848,  the 
earlier  numbers  were  reviewed  by  Abraham 
Hayward,  in  The  Edinburgh,  and  highly 
praised  as  "immeasureably  superior  to  all 
Thackeray's  previous  work."  By  this  time  the 
public  generally  held  a  similar  view  and 
people  were  talking  of  Thackeray  as  a  great 
novelist.     In  May,   1848,  Monckton  Milnes 

97 


98       THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

wrote  that  he  was  ''winning  a  great  social  suc- 
cess, dining  at  the  Academy  with  Sir  Robert 
Peel."  Trollope  writes,  ''in  that  year  1848  his 
name  becomes  common  in  the  memoirs  of  the 
time.  On  the  5th  of  June  I  find  him  dining 
with  Macready  to  meet  Sir  J.  Wilson,  Panizzi, 
Landseer,  and  others.''  The  same  year  Mac- 
ready  notes  that  he  "dined  with  Forster,  having 
called  and  taken  up  Brookfield,  met  Rintoul, 
Kenyon,  Proctor,  Kinglake,  Alfred  Tennyson, 
Thackeray."  In  the  same  year,  1848,  a  testi- 
monial was  sent  to  the  rising  genius  from  that 
city  of  Edinburgh  which  had  done  such  honour 
to  Dickens  seven  years  before.  Eighty  Scotch 
admirers  including  Dr.  John  Brown,  the  au- 
thor of  Rab  and  His  Friends,  presented 
Thackeray  with  a  silver  ink  stand.  It  will  be 
remembered  that  he  was  thirty-seven  in  July, 
1848,  and  that  the  last  number  of  Vanity  Fair 
appeared  the  same  month.  At  thirty-seven, 
then,  Thackeray  had  "arrived." 

He  took  his  success  quite  simply  and  natu- 
rally. He  dined  with  the  Duchess  of  Bedford, 
or  the  Duke  of  Devonshire,  or  Peel,  or  Lands- 
downe,  and  was  frankly  pleased  to  be  made 
much  of  by  the  great.  Of  course  silly  people 
have  sneered  at  him,  and  tried  to  show  that  he 
should  have  made  a  niche  for  himself  in  his 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY      99 

gallery  of  Snobs.  As  if  the  world's  recogni- 
tion of  a  hard  fought  victory  should  not  stir  a 
man's  blood!  Thackeray  was  above  such 
affectation.  He  neither  pretended  to  despise 
his  fame  nor  allowed  it  to  make  a  fool  of  him. 
He  did  not  forget  that  his  business  was  to  write 
books  and  to  keep  on  writing  books.  But  none 
the  less  he  was  set  up  in  spirit  because  that 
merciless  London  '^Society,"  which  had  no  re- 
gard for  any  but  them  of  power  and  influence, 
set  its  stamp  on  his  success.  He  sums  up  his 
feeling  in  those  two  oft-repeated  sentences 
upon  Lady  C, — ^'beautiful  serene,  stupid  old 
lady  .  .  .  she  asked,  'Isn't  that  the  great 
Mr.  Thackeray?'  O!  my  stars,  think  of 
that!" 

Two  of  the  most  singular  details  of  his  life 
fell  in  at  this  time  when  he  had  but  newly 
''arrived."  He  seems  to  have  had  an  almost 
morbid  fear  of  not  providing  adequately  for 
his  children  and  to  have  undervalued  the  hold 
he  had  got  on  the  public.  He  dreaded  an 
abandonment  by  that  fickle  mistress.  We 
see,  in  all  this,  the  same  oversensitiveness 
which  led  him  in  his  earlier  books  to  luxu- 
riate in  unhappiness,  which  led  him  now  to 
brood  upon  the  possible  catastrophe  that 
might  lie,  hid  in  the  future.     Under  stress  of 


100     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

his  solicitude,  he  forgot  to  judge  himself  by 
the  standard  he  set  up  for  the  world.  This  is 
what  explains  a  move  made  in  May,  1848, 
when  Thackeray  got  himself  called  to  the  bar 
at  the  Middle  Temple.  The  apparently 
pointless  procedure — for  he  does  not  seem 
to  have  had  the  least  idea  of  practising — ap- 
pears to  be  explained  by  the  fact  that  shortly 
afterward  Monckton  Milnes  made  an  attempt 
V  to  get  him  appointed  a  London  Magistrate. 
For  Thackeray,  the  satirist  of  placemen  and 
pensioners,  to  become  a  magistrate  through 
sheer  ''pull"  would  have  been  too  bad  and  the 
ill  judged  attempt  fortunately  failed.  The 
same  fate  overtook  another  piece  of  incon- 
sistency. Trollope  relates  that  Thackeray  had 
become  acquainted  with  the  Postmaster  Gen- 
eral, Lord  Clanricarde.  In  1848,  the  place 
of  assistant  secretary  at  the  General  Post  Office 
became  vacant  and  Lord  Clanricarde  wished 
to  give  it  to  Thackeray.  Says  Trollope,  "Lord 
Clanricarde  either  offered  it  to  him  or  prom- 
ised to  give  it  to  him."  But  his  lordship  had 
reckoned  without  his  host.  His  political  as- 
sociates protested.  Thackeray  knew  nothing 
of  the  business  of  the  post  office  and  if  ap- 
pointed would  come  in  over  the  heads  of  men 
of  tried  experience.     There  was  such  vigor- 


THE  LIFE  OF  THXCKEftAY     101 

ous  opposition  to  his  appointment  that  Lord 
Clanricarde  did  not  stand  to  his  guns  and  the 
matter  was  dropped. 

A  more  proper  incident  was  the  appearance 
in  November,  1848,  of  the  first  number  of 
Pendennis,  Thackeray  worked  upon  the  book 
as  it  came  out,  keeping  ahead  of  the  publishers 
as  best  he  could,  and  this  accounts  for  a  break 
in  the  publication  during  1849.  Thackeray 
fell  ill  and  came  near  to  death  but  was  saved 
by  his  admirable  physician.  Dr.  John  Elliot- 
son,  whose  name  he  has  immortalised  in  the 
grateful  dedication  of  Pendennis. 

This  brilliant  novel  makes  an  end  of  Thack- 
eray's first  manner.  Barry  Lyndon,  Vanity 
Fair  and  Pendennis,  these  three  form  a  group. 
They  are  united  by  that  ''joy  of  the  working," 
which  Thackeray  discovered  in  Barry  Lyn- 
don; by  means  of  which  he  rose  to  such 
heights  in  Vanity  Fair;  and  upon  which,  like 
an  eagle  sailing  with  spread  wings  out  of  the 
morning,  he  rested  in  Pendennis. 

The  success  of  Vanity  Fair  and  the  artistic 
confidence  sprung  from  that  success  had  borne 
immediate  fruit.  From  that  time  forward 
Thackeray  trusted  himself  as  an  artist.  He 
threw  ofif — in  most  respects  for  good:  in  some, 
perhaps  not — the  influence  of  Dickens.     Cer- 


102      THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

tain  things  with  which  he  had  forced  himself 
to  wrestle  in  Vanity  Fair,  he  let  go.  The 
whole  of  his  attention  was  now  centred  upon 
those  phrases  of  his  art  which  appealed 
peculiarly  to  his  temperament,  upon  the  style, 
the  details,  the  portraiture.  The  general  plan 
he  neglected. 

Contrasting  PenJennis  with  Vanity  Fair 
the  difference  between  the  two  is  very  notable. 
From  PenJennis,  the  burlesque  tone,  the  ex- 
aggeration of  characteristics,  the  straining  to 
be  funny — the  Dickens  elements  in  the  style — 
have  all  disappeared.  Real  people  step  forth 
from  the  page  and  look  us  square  in  the  eye. 
When  Thackeray  talks  himself  he  is  but  one 
of  the  company:  no  longer  the  genial  show- 
man interposing  his  whimsical  version  of 
things  between  us  and  the  fact.  But,  also, 
there  is  the  other  side  to  the  change.  All  that 
sustained  attempt  to  relate  everything  to  every- 
thing else,  to  make  it  all  tell  in  developing  a 
central  theme,  has  for  the  present  disappeared. 
There  is  hardly  a  beginning;  certainly  no 
middle;  and  the  end  would  seem  but  a  mat- 
ter of  space.  "We  have  run  far  enough,"  the 
author  seems  to  say,  "let  us  end." 
/'The  story  has  but  one  thread  like  a  loosely 
knit  biography.     Pen  was  born  and  his  father 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     103 

and  mother  were  so-and-so;  he  went  to  school 
at  the  Charterhouse;  his  father  died  while 
he  was  at  school;  he  came  home  and  had  a 
tutor;  he  was  the  apple  of  his  mother's  eye; 
he  fell  in  love,  as  he  thought,  with  the  beauti- 
ful Miss  Fotheringay,  the  daughter  of  Cap- 
tain Costigan,  of  Costiganstown,  Ireland,  de- 
scended of  kings,  but  at  present  supporting 
her  father  by  her  labour  as  an  actress ;  he  was 
pulled  out  of  the  scrape  by  his  worldly  old 
uncle,  the  Major;  he  was  sent  off  to  college, 
at  Oxbridge;  he  was  rather  gay  there  and 
spent  more  than  he  had;  he  was  later  sent  to 
the  Temple  where  he  grew  intimate  with 
George  Warrington;  he  had  his  little  flirta- 
tion with  little  Fanny  Bolton;  he  nearly  died 
of  a  fever;  he  sidled  away  from  law  into  litera- 
ture; he  had  a  long  absurd  and  unnecessary- 
flirtation  with  Blanche  Amory;  there  was  a 
misunderstanding  between  himself  and  his 
mother;  it  was  made  up;  at  last  he  succeeded; 
finally  he  had  sense  enough  to  get  his  eyes  open 
and  ask  Laura  who  is  ten  times  too  good  for 
him  but  whom  we  have  known  all  along  was, 
being  kept  in  reserve  to  make  a  proper  finale 
as  the  curtain  falls. 

The  rambling  course  of  the  narrative  makes 
possible  the  introduction  of  all  sorts  of  in- 


104      THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

cidents.  For  example,  there  is  the  story  of 
the  French  cook  Alcide  Merabolant,  who  was 
in  love  with  Blanche  and  declared  his  passion 
through  his  tarts  and  got  into  various  troubles. 
There  is  Chevalier  Strong  and  his  queer  ways 
of  living — ''Ned"  Strong  as  he  was  called — 
who  held  the  office  of  general  concilia- 
tor in  the  household  of  the  perfectly 
worthless  Sir  Frances  Clavering  and  his 
vulgar,  good-hearted,  much  abused  wife, 
who  had  an  Indian  fortune  and  was  called 
"the  Begum."  Like  Wenham  and  Wagg,  in 
Vanity  Fair,  and  others  later,  Ned  Strong  is  a 
professional  toady  and  hanger-on.  He  lives 
off  his  patron,  conducts  a  hundred  bits  of 
shady  business  for  him,  and  is  generally  a 
parasite.  Then  there  is  the  unfortunate 
Harry  Foker,  a  better  hearted  version  of 
young  James  Crawley  of  Vanity  Fair  who 
was  so  skilfully  euchered  out  of  the  game  by 
his  uncle  the  worthy  Pitt.  There  is  a  group 
of  literary  "gents,"  Paternoster  Row  people, 
scribbling  adventurers.  This  group  was  a 
stock  property  with  Thackeray  and  was  re- 
peated almost  man  for  man  in  Philip,  They 
are  extremely  entertaining  and  there  can  be 
little  doubt  that  in  creating  them  Thack- 
eray drew  on  his  memory.     What  happened  to 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     105 

Pen  and  Philip  in  their  attempts  to  get  started 
as  writers  pretty  certainly  had  happened  be- 
fore to  William  Thackeray. 

Naturally  attempts  have  been  made  to  dis- 
cover originals  for  these  ''gents."  This  is  the 
sort  of  thing  in  which  Mr.  Whibley,  like  that 
famous  character  in  Dickens,  ''comes  out 
strong."  A  dozen  of  his  pages  are  devoted 
to  a  discussion  of  Thackeray's  Grub  Street. 
"Bungay,"  says  Mr.  Whibley,  "is  an  unami- 
able  portrait  of  Colburn  the  publisher,  while 
Archer  ...  is  none  other  than  Tom  Hill 
of  the  Monthly  Mirror.  .  .  ."  Shandon  is 
a  portrait  of  Maginn  that  talented  Irishman 
who  turned  Chevy  Chase  into  Latin,  Homer 
into  an  English  ballad  and  "from  a  garret  in 
Wych  Street"  sent  forth  a  prospectus  of  "the 
whole  art  and  mystery  of  writing  a  paper," 
much  as  Shandon  did  from  the  Fleet  prison. 

In  connection  with  Pendennis  a  charge  is 
made  by  Mr.  Whibley  which  having  been 
brought,  must  be  reckoned  with.  In  his  eager- 
ness to  decry  Thackeray,  he  brings  into  court, 
as  a  witness  of  the  Englishman's  inferiority, 
none  other  than  Balzac.  Pendennis,  says  Mr. 
Whibley,  "has  the  same  motive  as  Tom  Jones, 
Oil  Bias,  Le  Pere  Goriot.  In  other  words 
it  describes  the  impact  of  an  enterprising  ad- 


106     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

venturous  youth  upon  the  world.  But  unlike 
the  heroes  of  the  other  masterpieces  I  have 
mentioned,  Pendennis  moves  in  a  formal  little 
circle  not  of  his  own  choosing.  His  ad- 
ventures are  limited  not  merely  by  his 
lack  of  courage,  but  by  a  narrow  ruth- 
less convention  of  life.  From  the  very 
first  he  is  taken  charge  of  by  the  tyrants  of 
habit  and  custom.  He  is  pushed  along  the 
common  groove  from  school  to  college,  from 
college  to  London,  until  he  reaches  the  com- 
fortable goal  of  fiction — a  blameless  marriage. 
When  Rastignac  emerged  from  the  humble 
boarding  house  near  the  Pantheon,  he  was  for- 
tified by  the  predatory  philosophy  of  Vautrin 
to  make  war  upon  society.  Pendennis  found 
a  mentor  more  circumspect  than  Rastignac's. 
His  Vautrin  was  the  admirable  Major  whose 
cynicism  conceived  nothing  worse  than  an  en- 
trance into  the  best  houses  and  a  rich  alliance. 
But  while  Rastignac  remains  a  triumph  of 
romantic  portraiture,  Pendennis  ends  as  he  be- 
gan, an  intelligent  meritorious  young  gentle- 
man." To  Mr.  Whibley's  way  of  thinking  the 
contrast  between  Vautrin  and  Major  Pen- 
dennis should  lead  us  to  ''understand  the  dif- 
ference not  merely  between  the  talent  of 
Balzac  and  the  talent  of  Thackeray,  but  some- 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     107 

thing  of  the  difference  between  France  and 
England." 

In  these  passages  occurs  more  than  one  mis- 
representation into  which  so  clever  a  man  as 
Mr.  Whibley  would  not  have  been  betrayed 
except  through  partisanship.  To  begin  with 
there  is  his  misuse  of  "motive."  By  a  literary 
motive  we  mean,  of  course,  that  idea  in  which 
is  contained  the  secret  of  a  book's  individ- 
uality. Obviously  this  must  be  something 
distinctive.  No  loose,  general  idea,  capable  of 
being  stated  a  hundred  different  ways,  can 
with  justice  be  called  a  literary  motive.  To 
get  at  the  motive  of  a  book  we  must  pare  down 
and  make  detailed  our  large  vague  impres- 
sions and  thus,  at  last,  detect  that  special  in- 
tention lying  back  of  the  book  by  reason  of 
which  it  is  separated  from  all  others.  For 
example,  if  we  said  that  the  motive  of  ''Romeo 
and  Juliet"  was  youthful  love  we  should  be 
little  nearer  the  fact  than  if  we  said  that  the 
motive  of  the  play  was  human  life.  Both 
statements  are  hopelessly  vague.  If  we  said 
that  "Romeo  and  Juliet,"  "The  Eve  of  St. 
Agnes"  and  "The  Day  Dream"  all  had  the 
same  motive,  because  all  deal  with  the  beauty 
of  youthful  love,  we  should  be  talking  non- 
sense.    In  each  poem,  the  poet  has  made  so 


108      THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

delicate,  so  individual,  the  idea  which  he  has 
to  express,  that  the  similarities  of  the  three 
are  effaced  by  their  differences.  The  same 
may  be  said  of  the  four  books  lumped  together 
by  Mr.  Whibley.  To  say  that  Pendennis, 
Tom  Jones,  Gil  Bias  and  Le  Pere  Goriot  all 
have  "the  same  motive,"  and  that  this  motive 
may  be  expressed  in  so  loose  and  vague  a 
phrase  as  "the  impact  of  an  enterprising,  ad- 
venturous youth  upon  the  world,"  is  to  fling 
away  all  accuracy  of  description.  We  might 
as  well  say  that  every  young  man  leads  the 
same  life  as  every  other  because  in  every  case 
worth  mentioning  we  have  "the  impact  of  an 
enterprising,  adventurous  youth  upon  the 
world."  We  should  then  demand  that  Mr. 
Whibley  enlarge  his  group  of  the  brethren 
of  Pendennis  and  include  about  a  thousand 
plays,  poems  and  novels,  beginning  with  the 
Iliad  which  records  the  impact  upon  the 
world  of  an  enterprising  adventurous  youth 
named  Achilles  and  coming  down  even  to 
Captains  Courageous  in  which,  according  to 
Mr.  Whibley's  reasoning,  we  find  the  same 
motive  as  in  Homer. 

The  contrast  between  Thackeray  and 
Balzac  is  so  point  blank  that  no  one  will  ques- 
tion it.    The  strange  thing  is  why  anybody 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     109 

should  lug  it  into  court.  To  belabour  Thack- 
eray because  Pen  is  not  Rastignac  is  neither 
more  nor  less  in  point  than  to  denounce  Balzac 
for  not  being  Homer.  To  say  that  in  the  con- 
trast between  the  Major  and  Vautrin  is  a  clue 
not  merely  to  the  difference  of  the  two  novel- 
ists but  of  the  two  nations  is  fantastic  to  de- 
gree. The  task  of  candid  biography  in  con- 
nection with  Pendennts,  as  with  all  the  novels, 
is  simply  to  account  for  it,  to  locate  in  the  ex- 
perience of  the  author  the  source  of  its  ideas. 
When  that  has  been  done  the  motive  of  the 
book  may  be  formulated  far  more  accurately 
than  by  an  unsympathetic  comparison  with  a 
masterpiece  of  a  totally  different  sort. 

We  have  seen  in  what  mood  and  under 
what  conditions  Thackeray  worked  upon 
Pendennts.  At  a  time  when  he  gave  very 
little  thought  to  his  matter,  and  put  almost  if 
not  quite  his  whole  strength  upon  the  manner, 
he  tried  to  follow  up  Vanity  Fair  by  a  lighter, 
more  graceful  work.  For  materials  he 
plunged  into  his  memory,  that  enormous  scrap 
book  of  odds  and  ends,  and  drew  from  it  a 
great  variety  of  diverting  recollections.  But 
with  these,  unfortunately — as  we  shall  see  in  a 
moment — came  up  once  more  his  gloomy  and 
pessimistic  views  of  life,  his  sentimentality. 


:i 


no     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAJVIA  IN 

Publishing  the  thing  piecemeal  and  work- 
ing on  it  from  hand  to  mouth,  under  compul- 
sion to  fill  a  certain  amount  of  space  each 
month,  he  made  no  attempt  to  join  all  the  parts 
into  a  consistent  whole,  dominated  through- 
out by  a  central  idea.  To  make  up  for  this 
lack,  he  redoubled  his  attention  to  detail,  rely- 
ing mainly  upon  that  mastery  of  style  which 
he  saw  he  had  attained.  Obviously,  of  a  book 
so  conceived  and  so  executed,  we  cannot  say, 
even  though  it  contain  the  adventures  of  a 
young  man,  that  its  literary  motive  is  "the 
impact  of  an  enterprising,  adventurous  youth 
upon  the  world,"  or  consider  for  a  minute  the 
grouping  of  its  hero  with  Achilles  and  Rastig- 
nac.  The  real  motive  of  the  book  is  lyrical 
rather  than  epic;  the  mood  of  the  author,  not 
)  the  hero's  adventures,  is  the  genuine  subject. 
This  is  the  reason  why  the  charm  of 
Pendennis  is  mainly  in  the  details.  Again  the 
clue  to  it  all  is  the  style  and  in  the  best  part 
of  Pendennis  we  have  the  height,  as  we  have 
the  end,  of  Thackeray's  first  manner.  Here 
the  ideas  glide  easily,  with  no  "fussing  under 
the  bows" — as  they  say  of  a  ship  that  cuts 
smoothly  and  steadily  through  the  sea.  The 
thought  passes  into  our  minds  so  delicately, 
with  so  little  commotion,  that  it  has  become 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     111 

part  of  us  before  we  have  will  to  question. 
What  we  notice  chiefly  in  the  effect  of  it  is  a 
constant  element  of  not  disquieting  surprise. 
Every  little  while  comes  an  easy  turn  of  some 
sort,  there  flashes  up  within  us  something 
charmingly  unusual  and  we  find  ourselves 
thinking  about  things  as  we  never  had  expected 
to  do.  The  best  of  these  little  surprises  in  our- 
selves is  that  they  always  seem  to  come  natu- 
rally and  when  once  they  have  occurred  we 
feel  they  are  all  that  ought  to  occur. 

At  first  blush  we  get  from  all  this,  as  from 
the  style  in  Vanity  Fair — even  more  so,  in  fact, 
for  this  is  still  better  done — a  general  impres- 
sion that  the  book  is  gay.  Careless  people  are 
deceived  and  put  it  down  for  one  of  the  gayest 
novels  in  the  language.  But  look  close  and 
see  what  is  behind  the  gaiety.  Listen  with 
the  inward  ear  and  catch  the  meaning  of  its 
accent.  Is  it  of  the  mind  or  of  the  heart?  Is 
there  anything  here  of  the  young  Shakespeare? 
Is  it  not,  after  all,  that  same  illusion  of  the 
manner  of  saying  things,  of  the  mere  style,  that 
deceived  us  in  Vanity  Fair? 

By  now  we  should  have  grown  used  to  the 
shimmer  of  this  wonderful  style  and  should  be 
able  to  see  through  it.  Doing  so  we  perceive 
a  widely   different  world   from   that  of  the 


112     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

lordly  youths  of  Shakespeare — Romeo,  Or- 
lando, Henry  V.  Here,  youth  is  not  a  con- 
queror. Far  from  it.  The  gallant  blunder,  the 
brave  folly,  the  chivalrous  misconception, 
the  attractive  w^eakness — it  is  among  these  that 
the  modern  stylist  takes  his  jaunty  course, 
beckoning  us  to  follow.  What  deceived  us  at 
first  blush  w^as  the  airy  lightness  of  his  step. 
Surely,  we  thought,  one  who  walks  so  gaily, 
so  debonairly,  must  be  going  to  a  wedding. 
But  did  not  French  ladies  trip  lightly  up  the 
steps  of  the  guillotine?  We  have  heard  how 
they  practised  it,  by  means  of  a  chair  upon  a 
table,  in  their  prison  yards.  And  if  some 
heroic  little  countess  who  had  done  that 
ghastly  rehearsal  without  a  fault  of  grace, 
cried  gaily  to  her  fellow  prisoners  for  their 
applause,  may  she  not  have  been  holding  back 
the  tears  and  saying  in  her  heart,  "Which  of 
us  is  happy  in  this  world?" 

The  moment  we  reflect,  we  perceive  how/ 
subtly  the  mere  manner  of  Pendennis  has  de- 
ceived us.  We  find  that  we  have  been. chat- 
ting over  two  of  the  saddest  of  Thackeray's 
creations  and  laughing  over  two  of  the  crud- 
est. We  have  seen  all  manner  of  things  go 
wrong,  and  only  a  few  go  right.  We  have 
been  at  elbows  with  injustice,  falseness  and 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    113 

heartbreak.  And  all  the  while  we  have  been 
laughing.  We  see  now  that  it  is  the  laughter 
of  despair  much  more  nearly  than  of  mirth. 
We  see  why  Trollope  insists  ''that  he  is  al- 
ways within  his  own  bosom  encountering  mel- 
ancholy with  buffoonery  and  meanness  with 
satire." 

However,  did  I  have  to  choose  one  episode 
which  standing  by  itself  should  be  the  repre- 
sentative of  Thackeray's  first  manner,  I  would 
choose  the  episode  of  the  Fotheringay.  To 
my  mind  it  combines  as  does  nothing  else  in 
that  manner  lightness  with  substance,  grace 
with  significance,  naturalness  with  power. 
In  every  line  of  it  there  is  that  precision  of 
stroke  which  does  not  come  until  success  has 
bred  confidence.  Also,  there  is  that  intimacy 
between  the  maker  and  his  material  which 
shows  that  he  is  past  the  period  of  experiment. 
He  knows  both  his  powers  and  his  limits  and 
does  not  waste  time  trying  to  do  things  he 
cannot  do.  As  to  the  contents  of  the  episode, 
we  catalogue  among  them,  the  finest  old  snob 
in  fiction,  the  best  Irish  blackguard,  one  of 
the  most  ironic  misanthropes,  one  of  the  most 
sufficing  symbols  of  the  placid  egoist,  and  a 
perfectly  delightful  exposition  of  the  engag- 
ing folly  of  youth. 


114     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAJMA  IN 

But  along  with  the  charm  of  the  first  man- 
ner we  have  in  Pendennis  its  underlying 
wretchedness,  its  false  conception  of  life. 
Among  the  half  dozen  tragedies  that  are 
pieced  together  to  make  the  dark  foundations 
of  this  glittering  fabric,  two  are  of  chief  mo- 
ment; and  both  give  opportunity  to  the 
enemies  of  Thackeray  to  accuse  him  of  senti- 
mentalism. 

Of  these,  the  greater  is  the  story  of  old 
Bowes  who  taught  the  Fotheringay  her  art. 
The  bitterness  that  lay  at  the  bottom  of  Thack- 
eray's first  manner  found  its  crowning  expres- 
sion in  the  relation  of  those  two.  And  all  his 
thinking  about  them  is  false.  Bowes,  the 
lame  musician,  the  ruined  and  hopeless 
dreamer;  Fotheringay,  the  serene  and  perfect 
egoist,  heartless,  rhindless,  soulless,  pure  self 
with  only  beauty  to  make  it  evident;  those  two 
and  their  relations  to  each  other  are  not  an 
expression  of  human  life  but  of  Thackeray's 
warped  conception  of  life.  In  Fotheringay 
he  has  merely  changed  the  sex  of  his  eternal 
egoist  and  ironically  decorated  it  with  an  out- 
side of  feminine  loveliness  while  vulgarising 
it  through  the  lack  of  mind.  It  is  a  wonder 
that  Mr.  Whibley,  in  his  zeal  to  find  fault 
.with  Thackeray,,  has  not  pointed  out  that  Miss 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    115 

Fothcringay  artistically  is  daughter  and  heir- 
ess to  the  Marquis  of  Steyne  and  that  in  her 
as  in  him  Thackeray  has  exaggerated  his 
image  of  egoism  until  it  is  almost  melodra- 
matic. In  the  case  of  Fotheringay  he  is  even 
worse  than  with  Steyne,  for  he  gave  the 
Marquis  some  great  qualities  and  did  not  try 
to  make  us  believe  that  anybody  loved  him. 
But  with  her,  though  depriving  her  deliber- 
ately of  every  possible  attraction  except  beauty 
— reiterating  that  she  is  simply  a  great,  stupid," 
impressive  animal — he  rings  the  changes  upon 
Bowes'  hopeless  love.  Bowes  knew  that  she 
was  stupid,  knew  that  she  was  an  animal,  knew 
there  was  nothing  to  her  but  her  beauty,  and 
yet  his  infatuation  instead  of  being  held  up  as 
a  symptom  of  something  wrong  in  himself,  is 
used  as  a  sort  of  wailing  chorus,  sounding 
melodiously  at  the  back  of  things,  like  the 
sound  of  the  sea  in  a  shell.  The  truth  is  poor 
old  Bowes — if  we  are  to  take  him  as  a  man 
and  not  as  a  mere  symbol — was  a  sentimental- 
ist. It  was  not  that  dull  woman — that  glori- 
fied cow — with  which  Bowes  was  in  love,  but 
a  dream  in  his  own  mind  which  he  sought  to 
make  the  woman  express.  When  we  cut  deep 
into  his  melancholy,  we  find  that  the  heart  of 
it  is  baffled  love  of  himself. 


116     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

However  these  two  are  not  really  to  be 
thought  of  as  persons.  They  are  but  symbols 
— Fotheringay  of  that  malign  fate  which  we 
are  asked  to  believe  rules  the  world,  Bowes 
of  its  shadow  upon  mankind — and  in  their  re- 
lations to  each  other  is  that  formula  of  human 
life  which  underlies  the  whole  of  the  first  man- 
ner. Really,  Mr.  Whibley  should  have  no- 
ticed this. 

The  other  of  the  two  tragedies  that  are  all 
wrong  is  the  story  of  George  Warrington. 
Thackeray  has  endeared  him  to  us  not  by  what 
the  man  was  in  himself  but  by  the  inimitable 
way  in  which  his  author  wrote  of  him.  Again, 
it  is  the  style  that  is  deceiving  us,  sentimentalis- 
ing us.  We  are  told  that  Warrington  flung 
away  his  life,  led  a  useless  existence  upon  the 
outskirts  of  Bohemia,  and  if  we  demand  why, 
we  are  asked  gravely  to  believe  the  following: 
when  very  young  he  had  been  caught  by  a  vul- 
gar woman — another  Fotheringay  apparently 
— and  having  come  to  his  senses  he  lost  desire 
for  fame  and  position  for  if  he  gained  them  his 
wife  would  assert  her  claim  to  him.  To  get 
rid  of  her  he  condemned  himself  to  be  a  do- 
nothing.  In  these  few  words  the  story  is 
ridiculous.  But  in  Thackeray  it  is  very  differ- 
ent.    Through  the  magical  skill  of  his  style 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     117 

Thackeray  imposes  on  us  yet  once  more,  gets 
possession  of  our  hearts,  and,  first  thing  we 
know,  we  are  weeping  over  Warrington  as  over 
a  suffering  hero.  But  when  the  tale  is  over 
and  the  spell  of  the  telling  has  worn  away,  we 
can  see  that  we  have  been  fooled.  Perhaps  we 
lose  our  tempers  and  ask  sarcastically  why 
didn't  Warrington  force  the  situation — defy 
the  woman,  or  make  her  over,  or  go  to  the 
colonies,  or  do  something — instead  of  smoking 
out  his  life  doing  nothing.  In  such  a  mood  we 
are  tempted  even  to  call  his  story  bosh. 

But  even  now  we  are  not  done  with  the 
cruelties  that  underlie  this  apparently  gay 
book.  We  have  still  to  reckon  with^^lanche 
Amory.  She  and  the  Fotheringay  arethe^o 
entirely  heartless  creatures  who  move  like 
clou3s "across  the  page.  Her  cruelty  to  Foker 
is  a  sort  of  burlesque  parallel  to  the  cruelty  of 
her  rival  to  Bowes.  As  to  artistic  descent, 
Blanche's  pedigree  is  not  so  plain.  Therej^  a 
certain  kinship  with  Becky  but  it  were  best  not 
to  press  the  point.  She  is  youthful  egoism. 
It  is  an  ugly  theme,  not  often  expressed,  hardly 
worthy  to  Be  expressed.  One  is  almost 
tempted  to  hope  that  no  one  will  ever  express 
it  again.  The  picture  is  exaggerated — as  of 
course  we  should  expect  at  this   period   in 


118     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

Thackeray — and  the  lines  of  it  are  laid  down 
with  a  contempt  that  is  almost  savage.  Wc 
shudder  and  turn  aside.  Here  is  Becky  minus 
her  charm,  minus  her  courage.  Here  is  the 
real,  last  analysis  of  what  Becky,  signifies^ 
Let  us  drop  the  curtain. 

Over  against  these  powerful  images  of  evil 
stand  two  inadequate  images  of  virtue,  Pen's 
mother  and  Laura  Bell.  Alas!  the  constant 
limitation  of  the  first  manner.  It  cannot 
unite  goodness  and  power.  Laura  is  almost 
colourless.  Mrs.  Pendennis,  for  all  her 
sweetness,  her  self-sacrifice,  is  without  mind 
and  exacts  full  return  for  her  affection.  Not 
to  mince  matters,  she  is  emotionally  a  tyrant. 
She  is  just  to  Pen  only  so  long  as  he  obeys  her. 
A  hint  of  Rawdon's  treatment  by  his  aunt 
survives  in  the  treatment  of  Pen  by  his  mother. 
Even  this  devoted  mother  is,  in  a  way,  an 
egoist.  Will  Thackeray  never  have  done 
with  this  cruel  theme? 

To  speak  of  Pendennis  without  saluting  the 
Major,  would  of  course,  be  incredible.  But 
with  so  famous  a  personage  it  would  hardly 
be  good  form  to  do  more  than  lift  one's  hat 
differentially  and  pass  on.  He  is  the  su- 
preme height  of  polite  snobdom. 

There  is  much  that  suggests  autobiography 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     119 

in  Tendennis.  A  great  deal  of  the  scenery 
came  directly  out  of  Thackeray's  own  associa- 
tions. Pen's  adventures  in  Devonshire,  at 
college  and  in  the  Temple  are  much  what 
Thackeray's  were.  Naturally  there  is  a 
temptation  to  identify  Arthur  Pendennis  with 
William  Thackeray  and  if  we  bear  in  mind 
Thackeray's  tendency  to  exaggerate  the  weak- 
ness of  his  characters,  the  identification  may 
be  allowed.  In  his  first  manner  he  was  never 
quite  just  to  anybody,  not  excepting  himself. 
It  seems  plain  that  Thackeray  was  not  sat- 
isfied with  his  own  attempt  to  write  the  novel 
of  youth.  He  makes  an  end  of  his  first  man- 
ner with  the  feeling,  apparently,  that  his  work 
was  insipid.  All  of  us  remember  his  famous 
saying,  relative  to  Pen,  that  no  Englishman 
since  Fielding  dared  draw  a  man.  This  has 
been  construed  to  signify  that  Thackeray  han- 
kered after  the  freedom  of  the  French.  But 
those  who  take  that  view  have  forgotten  an 
important  bit  of  evidence.  Thackeray  is  one 
of  the  few  novelists  whose  conception  of  youth 
involves  chastity.  He  takes  pains  to  tell  us 
that  though  Pen  had  many  vices  there  was 
one  from  which  he  was  free.  His  love  for 
his  mother  kept  him  apart  from  all  women 
whom  he  knew  were  impure.     Surely,  it  was 


120     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

not  the  French  freedom  to  be  scandalous  for 
which  Thackeray  longed,  but  just  what  it  was 
he  longed  for  we  cannot  say.  Of  one  thing, 
however,  we  may  be  sure.  Had  Thackeray 
been  a  happy  man,  had  he  not  been  borne 
down  by  his  lack  of  faith  in  life,  he  would 
have  been  just  the  one  to  write  the  epic  of 
youth,  to  take  youth  through  its  struggles  for 
the  sake  not  of  the  pathos  but  the  charm.  He 
knew  through  his  own  experience  what  my- 
riad pitfalls  surround  the  tender,  the  ardent, 
the  believing  heart  of  youth.  He  knew  what 
harm  has  been  done,  is  still  done,  by  the  im- 
modest veilings  spun  by  prudery.  He  longed 
to  tear  apart  the  veils,  to  throw  the  sunlight 
into  every  darkened  corner,  to  show  to  youth 
itself  the  glory  of  its  own  being  and  the  pity, 
the  inexpressible  pity,  of  abusing  it.  But  he 
had  not  the  heart  to  try.  Something  checked 
him,  something  held  him  back.  He  revenged 
himself  by  saying  that  people  would  not  lis- 
ten. But  that  was  not  all.  The  deeper  ex- 
planation was  his  own  irresolution,  his  own 
lack  of  faith,  his  own  doubt  whether  he  was 
not  dreaming  of  fairyland.  After  all,  most 
youth,  like  most  maturity,  showed  unpleasing 
aspects  to  his  biassed  eye.  He  could  not  write 
what  he  did  not  believe.     Thus  one  of  the 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     121 

great  opportunities  in  literature  passed  away. 
The  grandeur,  the  heroism  of  youth,  Shakes- 
peare gave  us;  the  comedy,  the  pathos  of  it, 
Thackeray  gave  us;  the  depth  and  the  won- 
der are  still  to  be  told. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  TURNING  POINT 

THE  famous  Athenaeum  Club  comes 
nearer  to  taking  the  place  of  the 
French  Academy  than  anything  else 
in  England.  A  recognition  of  Thackeray's 
success  was  his  election  to  the  Athenaeum,  Feb- 
ruary 25,  1 85 1.  It  has  often  been  stated  that 
he  had  been  previously  blackballed  but  Sir 
Leslie  Stephen  declares  that  the  report  is  un- 
founded. He  adds,  however,  that  an  attempt 
to  elect  Thackeray,  in  1850,  was  brought  to 
nought  by  the  opposition  of  a  single  member. 
The  move  to  elect  him  had  been  supported  by 
Macaulay,  Croker,  Dean  Milman  and  Lord 
Mahon. 

Thackeray's  fortunes  were  now  mending. 
He  had  hit  fame  and  was  becoming  prosper- 
ous. Nevertheless  he  could  not  lay  aside  his 
solicitude  over  his  children,  nor  cease  from 
his  anxiety  to  make  more  money.  For  this 
reason,  by  way  of  pot  boiling,  he  tried  his 

hand   at  lectures.     His  six  lectures   on   the 

122 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    123 

English  Humourists  were  delivered  at  Willis' 
Rooms  between  May  22  and  July  3,  1851. 

A  distinguished  company  attended  these 
lectures  which  had  the  appreciation  they  de- 
served, though,  to  Thackeray's  over-sen- 
sitive mind,  the  first  lecture,  on  Swift, 
seemed  a  failure.  He  read  from  his 
manuscript  making  no  attempt  at  oratory 
but  producing  as  all  witnesses  agree  a 
pleasing  efifect.  The  only  serious  charge 
which  his  enemies — Mr.  Whibley  and  others 
— have  been  able  to  advance  against  the 
Humourists  is  that  the  portrait  of  Swift  is 
overdone.  This  must  be  allowed.  Thack- 
eray was  so  struck  by  the  broad  traits  of  evil 
which  form  the  main  lines  of  Swift  that  he 
allowed  himself  to  put  into  the  Dean's  portrait 
much  the  same  exaggeration  which  he  had  put 
into  the  portrait  of  Steyne.  At  the  same  time 
we  should  remember  that  in  1851  the  attempt 
to  prove  Swift  less  black  than  he  had  been 
painted  had  not  begun.  Thackeray  was  but 
one  of  many  who  had  fallen  into  the  error  of 
imagining  Swift  the  devil. 

The  lectures  on  the  Humourists  are  the  be- 
ginning of  Thackeray's  second  manner.  The 
gaiety  of  Vanity  Fair  and  Pendennis,  that 
peculiar  brilliancy  as  of  the  first  hours  of  the 


124     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

day,  which  belongs  to  the  new-found  joy  of 
the  working,  has  run  its  course.  The  point 
in  the  career  of  any  artist  at  which  that  first 
wave  subsides  is  of  immense  significance 
psychologically,  and  when  the  mind  of  the 
artist  is  not  at  peace  the  subsidence  of  that 
wave  is  a  moment  of  crisis.  Right  there,  very 
likely,  he  will  be  weighed  in  the  balance.  Ac- 
cording as  the  heart  of  him  is  trivial  or  heroic 
it  will  follow  either  that  the  ebb  tide  ends 
the  story,  or  else  that  a  returning  wave  more 
deep  and  majestic  than  its  glittering  predeces- 
sor lifts  him  higher  than  before.  In  the  life 
of  Thackeray  that  point  of  crisis  was  the  year 

1851. 

Why  the  change  in  Thackeray  which  dates 
from  that  year  should  have  begun  precisely 
when  it  did  is  hard  to  say.  The  evidence  upon 
this  part  of  his  inward  drama  is  scant.  We 
may  take  it  on  faith  however,  that  the  noble 
heart  of  the  man — and  we  must  remember  that 
his  weaknesses  proceeded  always  from  mis- 
directed good,  never  from  anything  innately 
bad — had  long  been  slowly  making  head 
against  his  sensibilities.  The  psychologists 
say  that  resolutions  are  formed  in  us  slowly 
while  we  are  not  aware ;  that  the  power  to  make 
a  decision  or  perform  an  act  is  accumulated 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    125 

gradually,  like  the  quiet  banking  up  of  a 
stream  behind  a  dam;  but  that  only  when  the 
dam  suddenly  gives  way  and  the  stream  rushes 
through  do  we  see  what  has  been  coming  for- 
ward all  that  long  while  in  our  minds.  As 
I  say,  either  the  details  of  this  part  of  Thack- 
eray's drama  are  lost  or  his  family  have  not 
made  them  public,  so  that  there  is  a  gap  in 
our  knowledge  of  his  evolution  which  must  be 
bridged  by  conjecture.  And  as  conjecture  is 
unsatisfying  I  will  not  be  the  one  who  attempts 
to  make  the  bridge,  except  by  the  way  of  a 
single  suggestion. 

The  writing  of  the  Humourists  compelled 
Thackeray  to  do  justice  to  several  lives  in 
which  natures  as  sensitive  as  his  own  bore  ad- 
versity without  flinching.  To  portray  faith- 
fully such  a  character  and  such  a  career  as  that 
of  Addison,  or  of  Goldsmith,  Thackeray  had 
to  enter  into  their  minds  and  look  on  life  with 
their  eyes,  make  their  feelings  for  the  time  his 
own.  He  succeeded  in  doing  so  and  I  cannot 
but  think  that  the  effect  on  him  was  far-reach- 
ing. Had  he  not  been  ripe  to  be  effected,  had 
not  the  water  behind  the  dam  already  risen 
high,  this  last  addition  to  it  might  not  have 
cleft  the  dam  asunder.  We  must  conclude 
that  details-which  have  been  lost  would  have 


126     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

made  plain  that  Thackeray  obeyed  the  same 
psychological  law  as  the  rest  of  us  and  had 
been  preparing  for  his  transformation  with 
very  little  knowledge,  if  any,  of  whither  he 
was  tending.  When  we  look  forward  a  few 
months  and  note  the  part  which  in  the  scheme 
of  Henry  Esmond  he  assigned  to  Addison, 
surely  we  have  ground  for  thinking  that  in 
1 85 1,  when  Thackeray  was  at  work  upon  the 
Humourists  and  later  upon  Esmond,  he  went 
apart  many  times  into  spirit  land  and  had  there 
long  walks  and  talks  with  Addison  and  re- 
turned to  earth  bent  on  imitating  not  only  in 
his  art  but  in  his  life,  that  gallant  gentle- 
man. 

However,  be  this  as  it  may,  Thackeray 
turned  at  once  from  the  lectures  to  The  His- 
tory of  Henry  Esmond,  Esquire,  a  Colonel  in 
the  Service  of  Her  Majesty  Queen  Anne,  writ- 
ten by  Himself, 

Not  content  with  his  general  knowledge  of 
the  age  of  Anne  he  read  much  in  the  library 
of  the  British  Museum  and  the  Athenaeum 
Library,  and  made  every  effort  to  be  accurate 
in  detail.  The  manuscript  now  at  Trinity 
College,  Cambridge,  shows,  in  contrast  with 
his  earlier  manuscripts,  very  few  corrections. 
He  had  acquired  the  practised  hand  which 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    127 

hits  its  mark  at  the  first  stroke.  The  date  of 
the  completion  of  Esmond  seems  to  be  fixed 
by  a  letter  of  Fitzgerald,  dated  2  June,  1852, 
in  which  he  says  it  ''was  finished  last  Satur- 
day." Esmond  was  not  published  in  numbers 
and  Thackeray  kept  the  entire  manuscript  be- 
fore him  until  it  was  sent  to  the  publisher. 
This,  doubtless  accounts  for  its  comparative 
brevity — it  is  only  about  half  the  length  of 
The  Newcomes — and  for  the  closer  weave 
of  it.  There  was  no  obligation  to  fill  space 
at  all  cost  as  there  was  with  those  other  novels 
which  came  out  in  monthly  numbers  while 
Thackeray  was  still  at  work  on  them.  Es- 
mond had  a  good  sale  from  the  first  and  re- 
turned Thackeray  on  the  first  edition  £1200. 
In  writing  this  famous  novel,  so  often  called 
his  masterpiece,  Thackeray  fell  back  upon 
his  earlier  tour-de-force,  upon  Barry  Lyn- 
don, in  which  he  had  proved  to  himself  that 
he  could  write  a  fictitious  autobiography  and 
make  it  express  in  every  line  not  his  own 
personality  but  that  of  the  supposed  author. 
The  subtlety  of  his  mind  delighted  in  such 
an  undertaking,  in  its  demand  for  deftness, 
for  tact.  Not  a  statement,  not  an  opinion, 
not  a  recollection  of  Barry  Lyndon's,  but  was 
coloured  by  the  man's  feeling  and  compelled 


128     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

to  reveal  his  nature.  In  Esmond,  Thackeray 
repeated  at  greater  length  but  with  a  less  diffi- 
cult subject  the  same  extraordinary  feat. 
Having  gathered  together  various  types  and 
set  them  down  in  the  history  of  the  time  of 
Anne  he  gives  us  not  his  own  version  of  what 
they  were,  and  how  they  did,  but  the  version 
of  one  of  the  actors  in  the  piece.  From  be- 
ginning to  the  end,  it  is  never  Thackeray  who 
speaks,  always  the  melancholy  Colonel  Es- 
mond. 

The  world  which  Colonel  Esmond  knew, 
which  that  eminent  literary  person  has  de- 
scribed so  remarkably,  was  on  the  outside  the 
world  of  Queen  Anne.  Its  events  were  the 
events  of  that  reign.  But  let  us  not  be  de- 
ceived. Colonel  Esmond  lived  in  a  Reign  of 
Anne  which  was  especially  constructed  for 
his  use  and  whose  people,  with  very  few  ex- 
ceptions, are  people  not  of  the  eighteenth 
century  but  of  the  first  manner  of  William 
Thackeray.  The  book  does  not  become  in- 
telligible biographically  until  we  grasp  this 
fact.  In  Henry  Esmond  we  have  the  peo- 
ple of  Thackeray's  first  manner,  presented  to 
us  through  a  new  medium,  and  made  to  enact 
for  our  amusement  an  historical  drama.  The 
novel  must  not  be  classed  with  those  which 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    129 

went  before,  for  in  Esmond  there  is  a  new 
temper  which  sets  it  aside  and  because  of 
which  we  say  it  is  in  Thackeray's  second  man- 
ner. However,  though  Thackeray's  temper 
has  changed,  his  material  is  still  in  the  main 
what  it  has  been.  For  the  originals  of  the 
people  in  Henry  Esmond,  for  the  source  of 
its  conception  of  life,  we  should  look  not  to 
history  but  to  that  peculiar  assemblage  of 
ideas  in  which  Thackeray  moved  and  had  his 
being  between  thirty  and  forty. 

Nothing  is  more  fundamental  in  that  world 
of  the  first  manner  than  the  prevalence  of  an 
ironic  fate.     In  the  world  of  Colonel  Esmond 
this  is  duplicated.     All  the  circumstances  of 
his  life  move  in  tune  with  the  old  refrain — 
which  of  us  is  happy  in  this  world.   \AVe  see    / 
him  first  in  his  youth,  when  he  is  supposed,    / 
and  supposes  himself,  to  be  the  natural  son  of 
the  former  Lord  Castlewood  and  therefore  a  I 
mere  dependent  on  the  present  lord.     For  that  ' 
reason  in  his  relations  with  the  lovely  Lady 
Castlewood,     and    her    charming    children, 
Frank  and  Beatrix,  in  spite  of  all  their  kind- 
ness, he  can  never  quite  forget  how  fate  has 
dealt  with  him.     And  then  by  a  sudden  stroke 
of  fortune  the  situation  is  reversed  and  the 
irony  made  ten  fold  more  oppressive.     Lord 


/ 


130     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAJSIA  IN 

Castlewood,  dissolute  and  a  gambler,  whose 
wife  we  discover  is  very  jealous,  falls  into  reck- 
less habits  and  the  result  is  his  duel  with  Lord 
Mohun.  On  his  death  bed  he  tells  Henry 
the  truth,  that  he  is  true  born  and  the  rightful 
Lord.  But  ironic  fate  has  Henry  in  its  grasp. 
He  has  accepted  so  many  favours  of  this  Lord 
and  his  family,  his  own  sensibilities  are  so 
potent,  that  he  feels  he  cannot  assert  himself. 
Therefore  he  stands  by  and  lets  young  Frank 
succeed.  But  again  his  position  becomes  iron- 
ical. Lady  Castlewood,  conscious  that  she  has 
not  loved  her  husband,  seeks  to  clear  herself 
to  her  conscience  by  a  violent  parade  of  grief, 
and  incidentally  by  refusing  to  have  more  to 
do  with  Henry,  nominally  because  he  did  not 
prevent  the  duel,  really  because  she  is,  and 
now  admits  to  herself  that  she  long  has  been, 
in  love  with  him.  So  fate  acts  throughout 
the  book.  Always  in  all  Henry's  version  of 
human  affairs,  there  is  the  malign  influence, 
coming  we  know  not  whence,  but  having  the 
effect  of  thwarting  our  heart's  desire.  As  a 
soldier,  as  a  politician,  as  a  lover,  as  a  man,  he 
is  always  crossed  by  destiny.  In  the  wars,  he 
moves  with  awed  hatred  in  the  shadow  of  the 
dreadful  Marlborough,  that  heartless  imper- 
sonation of  fate;  he  sees  his   dear  General 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     131 

Webb  cheated  of  the  credit  for  his  brilliant 
victory  of  Wynandael;  and  at  last  he  sees 
Marlborough  fall  for  no  apparent  reason  ex- 
cept that  it  is  the  fate  of  everybody  to  go  down. 
In  politics  there  comes  a  time  when  he  mixes 
boldly  into  the  great  game  of  foisting  the  Pre- 
tender on  the  nation  at  the  death  of  Anne  but 
again  the  malign  influence  that  rules  the 
affairs  of  men  interferes;  the  Pretender  slips 
away  from  London  into  the  country  after  the 
bright  eyes  of  Beatrix  and  so  the  one  moment 
when  he  might  have  won  the  game  is  lost. 
As  a  lover,  having  been  reconciled  to  the 
Castlewood  family  he  dangles  after  Beairix 
for  near  ten  years,  while  she,  according  to  his 
account  of  her,  plays  the  part  of  a  heartless 
coquette  and  is — by  implication — impervious 
to  all  the.  noble  qualities  in  man.  And  Bea- 
trix also  is  cheated  by  fate,  for  the  great  Duke 
she  was  to  marry  is  killed,  shortly  before  their 
wedding  day,  by  that  same  Mohun  who  killed 
her  father.  Finally,  Lady  Castlewood,  who 
all  this  while  has  really  been  in  love  with 
Henry  and  jealous  of  Beatrix,  becomes  his 
wife.  That  is  the  last  arch  irony  of  all  as 
Thackeray  has  made  plain  in  The  Virginians 
where  we  have  a  glimpse  of  Esmond,  long 
after,  resigned  but  not  happy,  a  distinguished, 


132     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

melancholy  gentleman,  who  is  still  at  heart  in 
love  with  Beatrix. 

The  origin  of  the  chief  people  in  this 
troubled  assemblage  is  quite  plain.  Perhaps 
the  most  obvious  is  Marlboroug^h.  He  is  but 
the  climax  of  Thackeray's  procession  of  colos- 
sal egoists.  He  is  Steyne  translated  into  ah 
Olympian.  His  shadow  makes  a  darkness 
upon  the  world  over  which  he  rises  like  some 
beautiful  evil  spirit  ^'having  this  of  the  god- 
like in  him  that  he  could  see  a  hero  perish 
or  a  sparrow  fall,  with  the  same  amount  of 
sympathy  for  either." 

Mr.  Whibley,  always  lying  in  wait  to  cast  a 
stone,  makes  a  great  fuss  about  the  portrait 
of  Marlborough.  He  implies  that  in  paint- 
ing it  Thackeray  illustrated  the  unlimited 
capacity  of  sentimentalism  to  believe  in  bad- 
ness. He  points  out  that  the  Marlborough  of 
Henry  Esmond  is  not  only  false  historically 
but  absurd  as  an  image  of  a  man,  that  it  is 
mere  melodrama.  Having  cited  the  scene 
at  the  banquet  where  Webb  hands  the  Gazette 
to  his  chief  on  the  point  of  his  sword,  he  ex- 
ults in  the  assertion  that  even  Thackeray  did 
not  dare,  once  he  had  brought  the  great  Duke 
upon  the  scene,  to  make  him  anything  but  mas- 
ter of  the  situation. 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     133 

What  a  lot  of  pother  about  nothing!  If  Mr. 
Whibley  would  only  bear  in  mind  what 
Thackeray  was  doing  in  Esmond  all  his  right- 
eous indignation  would  disappear.  All  he  has 
said  is  true  but  it  hits  not  Thackeray  but  Col- 
onel Esmond.  As  well  be  angry  with  Thack- 
eray because  things  are  seen  out  of  focus  by 
Barry  Lyndon  as  because  the  same  happens 
with  Henry  Esmond.  In  his  way,  the  latter 
is  as  far  from  a  normal  character  as  the  for- 
mer and  he  reveals  his  bias  in  the  huge  melo- 
dramatic monster  which  he  seeks  to  impose  on 
us  as  John  Churchill.  The  way  in  which  his 
fiction  collapses  into  nothing  the  moment  we 
face  the  actual  giant — though  he  makes  only 
two  remarks  and  these  of  the  simplest — is  one 
of  Thackeray's  fine  achievements. 

The  real  hint  which  we  should  get  from  the 
unreal  image  of  Marlborough  is  that  Esmond 
is  not  an  accurate  reporter;  that  he  does  not 
see  people  as  they  are.  How  anyone  should 
fail  to  observe  this  fact — especially  after  Barry 
Lyndon — is  strange.  Esmond's  view  of  life  is 
so  definite  and  so  perfectly  sustained  that  we 
must  allow  for  it  at  every  turn.  Nevertheless 
Thackeray  seems  to  have  had  a  fear  that  people 
who  read  with  but  one  eye  might  miss  the 
point  and,  therefore,  twice,  by  means  of  foot- 


134      THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

notes,  he  thrust  it  in  our  faces  that  the  whole 
of  Esmond's  performance  is  what  actors  call 
"in  character."  One  of  the  two  notes  explains 
that  a  certain  passage  was  inserted  into  the 
memoirs  in  Esmond's  old  age  when  if  not  a 
better  he  was  at  least  a  wiser  man  than  in  those 
earlier  days  when  the  memoirs  were  written 
and  the  great  Duke  was  so  grossly  libelled. 
Colonel  Esmond  was  not  of  large  enough  na- 
ture to  make  a  generous  apology  for  his  libel, 
but  even  he,  upon  mature  reflection,  felt  that 
some  sort  of  retraction  was  due.  Accordingly, 
"on  a  fly  leaf  inserted  into  the  ms.  book  and 
dated  1744"  (so  says  the  note)  he  made  this 
grudging  and  ungenerous  admission  of  his  own 
lack  of  candour:  "Should  any  child  of  mine 
take  the  pains  to  read  these  his  ancestor's 
memoirs,  I  would  not  have  him  judge  the  great 
Duke  by  what  a  contemporary  has  written  of 
him.  No  man  hath  been  so  immensely  lauded 
and  described  as  this  great  statesman  and  war- 
rior: as,  indeed,  no  man  ever  deserved  better 
the  very  greatest  praise  and  the  strongest  cen- 
sure. If  the  present  writer  joins  with  the  lat- 
ter faction,  very  likely  a  private  pique  of  his 
own  may  be  the  cause  of  his  ill-feeling." 

One  would  think  that  this  were  enough  to 
put  even  a  careless  reader  on  the  right  track 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    135 

but  Thackeray,  to  make  assurance  more  than 
sure,  added  that  other  note,  the  little  essay  in- 
serted in  the  memoirs  by  Esmond's  grandchild, 
beginning,  "Our  grandfather's  hatred  of  the 
Duke  of  Marlborough  appears  all  through  his 
account  of  these  campaigns,"  and  closing  with 
''He  was  as  constant  in  his  dislikes  as  in  his 
attachments ;  and  exceedingly  partial  to  Webb 
whose  side  he  took  against  the  more  celebrated 
general.  We  have  General  Webb's  portrait 
now  at  Castlewood,  Va." 

Remembering,  then,  that  we  have  in  the 
portrait  of  Marlborough  not  an  authentic  like- 
ness of  the  great  Duke  but  only  a  record  of 
his  impression  on  Henry  Esmond — the  impres- 
sion he  made  on  a  sensitive  and  unforgiving  na- 
ture— we  turn  to  another  portrait  drawn  by  the 
same  hand  and  more  famous  even  than  that 
of  Marlborough.  We  may  note  in  passing  that 
.^  previous  to  Henry  Esmond  Thackeray  had 
^  not  put  a  masculine  and  feminine  egoist  of  the 
first  magnitude  into  the  same  book.  Though 
Vanity  Fair  had  Steyne  it  had  no  correspond- 
ing woman.  Though  Pendennis  had  the 
Fotheringay  she  was  without  a  counterpart 
among  the  men.  But  Esmond  has  them  both. 
The  same  idea  that  is  at  the  bottom  of  the 
Fotheringay — the   idea   of   utterly   merciless 


136      THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAJVIA  IN 

beauty — is  dignified  with  birth,  wit,  courage, 
and  given  the  name  of  Beatrix  Esmond.  In 
her  and  Henry, — as  the  lafter  believes,  at  least, 
— is  such  a  relation  as  existed  in  Pendennis  be- 
tween the  Fotheringay  and  Bowes.  I  insist 
that  this  is  Colonel  Esmond's  version  of  the 
facts  and  not  necessarily  Thackeray's.  To 
Colonel  Esmond's  eye,  Beatrix  was  a  heartless 
flirt,  whom  he  worshipped  for  ten  years,  to 
whom  he  offered  sacrifices  daily,  but  who  was 
dead  to  love.  At  last,  in  sheer  disgust  at  her 
heartlessness  he  turned  haughtily  away  from 
her  and  married — O  irony  of  ironies! — her 
mother.  And  the  melancholy  Colonel,  who 
does  not  appear  to  have  known  that  humour 
existed,  could  write  this  down  and  leave  it  be- 
hind in  his  memoirs! 

We  must  never  forget  in  discussing  this  novel 
that  Henry  Esmond  is  modelled  on  Barry  Lyn- 
don, The  fact  that  Colonel  Esmond  is  a  gen- 
tleman, and  that  his  ideas  have  much  in  com- 
mon with  our  own  should  not  hoodwink  us. 
In  the  earlier  autobiography  we  never  forget 
that  Barry  is  talking  because  at  every  turn  we 
perceive  his  separation  from  ourselves.  But 
in  the  case  of  Colonel  Esmond,  all  his  ordinary 
ideas  are  the  ordinary  ideas  of  the  people  we 
know,  and  by  these  ideas  we  are  thrown  off  our 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    137 

guard  so  that  we  forget  at  times  that  on  ex- 
traordinary matters  he  is  sharply,  invariably 
himself.  Therefore,  we  must  bear  in  mind 
that  his  version  of  Beatrix  is  a  prejudiced  one. 
An  exacting  and  jealous  man — for  such  he 
was — has  painted  pretty  black  the  beautiful 
woman  whose  heart  he  could  never  touch. 
But  the  question  arises,  "Is  Beatrix  a  coherent 
character?"  Mr.  Whibley  seizes  upon  her  as 
one  more  count  in  his  charge  against  Thack- 
eray. He  declares,  in  substance,  that  she  is  not 
a  person,  only  the  most  beautiful  of  lay  figures. 
In  reply,  I  would  ask  the  reader  to  experiment. 
Suppose  we  break  off  in  reading  Esmond 
at  the  death  of  the  Duke  of  Hamilton.  Is  not 
the  Beatrix  we  know,  then,  a  person?  I  be- 
lieve she  is — a  beautiful,  brilliant,  hard,  but 
not  necessarily  an  evil,  being.  Suppose  now, 
we  put  aside,  if  we  can,  the  thought  of  that 
Beatrix  and  turn  to  that  other  of  the  last 
episode  of  the  book,  the  Beatrix  who  made 
such  a  dead  set  at  the  Pretender,  who  spoiled 
his  chance  for  succession  to  the  crown,  then  fol- 
lowed the  worthless  young  fool  to  Paris  and 
ended  her  career  in  a  way  Esmond  scorns  to 
tell.  Is  the  latter  a  real  person  or  a  piece  of 
melodrama?  If  she  is  real,  does  she  unite 
with  the  first? 


138      THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

For  my  own  part  I  feel  that  we  have  here 
two  creations,  that  the  first  and  the  second 
cannot  be  wrought  together  as  one  person, 
and  that  the  later  Beatrix  is  melodramatic.  In 
the  first  Beatrix  Thackeray  started  out  to  give 
us  a  portrait  of  a  genuine,  splendid  human  flirt. 
Afterwards  in  another,  and  perhaps  a  truer 
book,  he  did  what  he  here  set  out  to  do  and 
the  result  was  Ethel  Newcome.  But  in 
Esmond  he  allowed  himself  to  be  side  tracked 
and  fell  back  upon  melodrama  to  the  tune  of 
Bowes  and  the  Fotheringay.  Even  when  we 
allow  for  the  exaggerations  due  to  Esmond's 
disposition,  the  later  Beatrix  is  an  odious  and 
unreal  creature  who  is  a  libel  on  the  first. 

The  Beatrix  who  talked  to  Esmond  in  the 
fifth  chapter  of  the  third  book — that  day  he 
gave  her  the  diamonds  and  Duke  Hamilton  re- 
sented it  and  Lady  Castlewood  revealed  the 
secret  of  his  birth — is  a  real  person  not  with- 
out a  heart.     Had  Esmond  been  worthy  of  her 
— but  here  are  her  own  words  :^'in  eight  years 
/no  man  hath  ever  touched  my  heart.     Yes — 
'    you  did  once  for  a  little,  Harry,  when  you 
came  back  from  Lille  and  engaging  with  that 
^    murderer  Mohun,  and  saving  Frank's  life.     I 
/   thought  I  could  like  you ;  and  mamma  begged 
me  hard,  on  her  knees,  and  I  did — for  a  day. 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     139 

But  the  old  chill  came  over  me,  Henry,  and 
the  old  fear  of  you  and  your  melancholy,  and 
I  was  glad  when  you  went  away,  and  engaged 
with  my  Lord  Ashburnham  that  I  might  hear 
no  more  of  you,  that's  the  truth.  You  are 
too  good  for  me,  somehow.  I  could  not  make 
you  happy,  and  I  should  break  my  heart  in 
trying  and  not  being  able  to  love  you." 

Was  Henry  Esmond  to  blame  because  no 
man  ever  touched  the  heart  of  Beatrix? 
She  cared  for  him  at  the  one  time  when  he 
flared  up,  in  her  imagination,  into  buoyant 
manfulness.  But  he  relapsed  almost  im- 
mediately into  gloom  and  sentimentality  and 
poses.  She  knew  he  could  never  forget  him- 
self and  hence  her  fear  of  him,  her  sense  of 
oppression  when  she  was  with  him.  Surely, 
even  through  the  veil  of  Colonel  Esmond's 
sentimentalised  version,  the  facts  are  plain. 
The  first  Beatrix  was  a  bold  and  clear-sighted 
woman  who  must  have  for  her  love  a  man  in 
tune  with  herself.  At  the  time  when  we  saw 
her  last  she  had  not  found  him. 

The  second  Beatrix  we  may  concede  to  Mr. 
Whibley.  In  comparison  with  the  first  she 
is  almost  vulgar.  Her  career  is  the  only  thing 
in  Henry  Esmond  that  may  be  justly  charged 
against  Thackeray  and  not  put  down  to  the 


140      THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

biassed  view  of  Esmond  himself.  The  first 
Beatrix,  had  she  been  the  heroine  of  that  fine 
scene  in  which  her  mother,  her  brother  and 
the  jealous  Colonel  reveal  to  the  second  Bea- 
trix that  they  have  no  faith  in  her,  would  have 
turned  on  them  like  an  angry  queen,  and  made 
them  appear  contemptible.  The  second  Bea- 
trix has  so  little  majesty  that  we  could  hardly 
be  more  surprised  if  she  let  slip  an  oath. 
This  part  of  the  incident  might,  to  be  sure, 
be  accounted  for  on  the  ground  of  the  Col- 
onel's misrepresentation  but  such  explanation 
will  hardly  clear  her  for  luring  the  Pretender 
away  at  the  critical  moment  and  so  spoiling 
the  intrigue.  We  are  certainly  intended  to 
accept  as  truth  the  Colonel's  version  of  her 
disgraceful  later  life — all  of  which  in  connec- 
tion with  the  first  Beatrix  is  unbelievable. 
,  Her  mother  is  the  true  compliment  of 
^  Henry.  Like  him  she  is  a  sentimentalist, 
luxuriating  in  her  own  emotions,  with  a 
fondness  for  being  unhappy.  The  base  of 
her,  perhaps  is  Mrs.  Pendennis.  But 
though  Mrs.  Pendennis  was  weak,  tyran- 
nical and  suspicious  we  must  not  accuse 
her  of  too  close  kinship  with  the  highly 
sentimental  and  intensely  jealous  Lady  Castle- 
wood.     Let  the  latter  as  far  as  possible  stand 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     141 

alone,  a  monument  of  emotional  egoism  with  a 
smoothly  pious  front  which  imposed  entirely 
on  itself. 

There  remains  to  be  accounted  for  the  char- 
acter of  Henry  Esmond,  and  in  this  character 
lies  the  real  significance  of  the  book  both  to  the 
general  reader  and  to  the  student  of  Thack- 
eray's development.  We  find  among  the 
earlier  figures  no  one  that  will  serve  as  orig- 
inal for  Esmond  and  yet  the  most  superficial 
observer  must  feel  that  Esmond's  nature  is  in 
harmony  with  the  underlying  ideas  of  the  first 
manner.  There  we  have  him.  Esmond  is 
simply  the  point  of  view  which  lay  back  of 
the  first  manner  made  into  a  man. 

It  is  plain  that  in  1851  Thackeray  waked  to 
a  realisation  of  what  he  had  been  doing  in  the 
half  dozen  years  previous.  He  saw  that  he 
had  allowed  himself  to  be  sentimentalised,  to 
make  a  luxury  of  unhappiness;  that  he  had 
permitted  himself  to  set  a  premium  on  melan- 
choly and  to  undervalue  the  duty  of  cheerful- 
ness; that  he  had  misrepresented  the  world  to 
his  own  mind  and  had  paid  the  price  of  failing 
to  understand  the  world.  This  subject  of  his 
mistaken  point  of  view,  and  of  its  inevitable 
results,  must  have  deeply  impressed  him  for 
he  set  to, work  to  embody  it  in  a  novel.     He 


142     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

created  a  character  which  was  the  perfect  ex- 
pression of  that  point  of  view,  in  whom  there 
were  no  counteracting  elements — such,  for- 
tunately, as  Thackeray  had  in  himself.  That 
is  to  say,  he  made,  in  mathematical  phrase,  a 
reductio  ad  absurdum.  Therefore  the  charac- 
ter was  melancholy,  sensitive,  brooding,  egois- 
tic, sentimental,  and  all  these  to  an  extreme. 
About  this  character  he  placed  such  a  world — 
except  for  a  single  great  exception — as  he  had 
himself  seen  through  the  medium  of  his  dis- 
torted sensibilities.  For  the  text  of  the  novel 
he  set  down  with  utmost  skill  an  account  of 
that  world  as  it  appeared  to  the  character. 
Such  is  the  plain  origin  of  The  History  of 
Henry  Esmond, 

Those  who  are  unaccustomed  to  observe 
closely  the  habits  of  mind  of  an  artist,  who 
have  not  noticed  how  his  works  grow,  the  later 
from  the  earlier,  like  plants  from  cuttings, 
might  set  this  aside  as  mere  accident  were 
it  not  for  two  considerations.  In  Esmond 
Thackeray  does  two  things  which  he  never 
did  before.  In  the  first  place  he  makes  a 
sentimentalist  betray  his  nature.  By  numer- 
ous little  comments,  chiefly  from  Beatrix, 
which  the  Colonel  is  sufficiently  candid  to  pre- 
serve, we  see  that  she  understood,  and  through 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     143 

her  we  come  to  understand,  that  the  core  of 
Esmond  is  preoccupation  with  himself."  That 
is  wh^rgets  in  his  way  throughout  life.  He 
is  always  nursing  his  emotions,  always  lux- 
uriating in  his  trouble.  As  an  inevitable  con- 
sequence he  never  can  be  happy.  His  melan- 
choly is  no  mere  accident.  By  means  of  it  we 
see  judgment  passed  upon  that  type  of  char- 
acter which  is  preoccupied  with  self,  that  can 
never  forget  itself  in  sympathy  with  others. 
No  wonder  St.  John  used  to  call  him  "the 
Knight  of  the  Rueful  Countenance.'^  No 
wonder  he  frightened  Beatrix.  And  all  this 
the  reader  is  made  to  see  very  subtly  through 
the  words  of  the  man  himself.  It  is  vain  to 
call  such  art  accidental. 

The  other  thing  which  Thackeray  had  not 
attempted  in  any  previous  novel  was  the  same 
undertaking  which  had  been  forced  on  him  by 
writing  the  Humourists.  Again  we  wonder 
whether  those  lectures  do  not  mark  the  very 
crisis  of  his  life.  In  no  work  of  the  first  man- 
ner is  there  any  strong  good  man  who,  though 
unfortunate,  is  not  cast  down,  and  who  was 
free  from  sentimentality.  In  the  Humourists, 
for  the  first  time,  Thackeray  did  justice  to 
such  characters.  Having  gone  on  into  The 
History  of  Henry  Esmond  he  contrived  to 


lU     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

take  with  him  the  beautiful  figure  of  Addison, 
and  if  this  book  contained  no  other  evidence 
of  a  change  of  mood  in  the  artist  the  presence 
of  this  one  figure  would  be  enough.  Even 
through  the  veil  of  Esmond's  false  way  of 
seeing  things,  that  undaunted  countenance 
shines  forth.  In  his  quiet  way,  in  a  corner  of 
the  picture,  this  man  is  as  essential  to  the 
whole  effect  as  even  the  warrior  Duke  who 
overshadows  it  all.  He  is  a  prophecy  of  what 
Thackeray  will  come  to  in  that  noble  third 
manner  of  his,  which,  at  the  time  Esmond 
was  written,  still  slept  in  the  future.  What 
could  be  finer  than  Addison's  talk  in  his  gar- 
ret after  the  entrance  and  exit  of  a  brilliant 
official. 

''Does  not  the  chamber  look  quite  dark?" 
says  Addison  surveying  it,  ''after  the  glo- 
rious appearance  and  disappearance  of  that 
gracious  messenger?  Why,  he  illuminated 
the  whole  room.  Your  scarlet  Mr.  Esmond 
will  bear  any  light;  but  this  threadbare  old 
coat  of  mine  how  very  worn  it  looked  under 
the  glare  of  that  splendour!  I  wonder 
whether  he  will  do  anything  for  me,"  he  con- 
tinued. "When  I  came  out  of  Oxford  into 
the  world,  my  patrons  promised  me  great 
things;  and  you  see  where  their  promises  have 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     145 

landed  mc,  in  a  lodging  up  two  pairs  of  stairs, 
with  a  six  penny  dinner  from  the  cook's  shop. 
Well,  I  suppose  this  promise  will  go  after  the 
others  and  fortune  will  jilt  me  as  the  jade  has 
been  doing  any  time  these  seven  years.  .  .  . 
Friend  Dick  hath  made  a  figure  in  the  world 
and  passed  me  in  the  race  long  ago.  What 
matters  a  little  name  or  a  little  fortune? 
There  is  no  fortune  that  a  philosopher  cannot 
endure  .  .  .  'tis  not  poverty  that's  the  hard- 
est to  bear  or  the  least  happy  lot  in  life,"  says 
Mr.  Addison,  shaking  the  ash  out  of  his  pipe. 
*^See  my  pipe  is  smoked  out.  Shall  we  have 
another  bottle?  I  have  still  a  couple  in  the 
cupboard  and  of  the  right  sort.  No  more? — 
let  us  go  abroad  and  take  a  turn  on  the  Mall, 
or  look  in  at  the  theatre  and  see  Dick's 
comedy.  'Tis  not  a  masterpiece  of  wit;  but 
Dick  is  a  good  fellow  though  he  doth  not  set 
the  Thames  on  fire." 

From  this  serene  man  who,  no  less  than 
Esmond,  was  made  unhappy  by  a  woman,  and 
who  by  his  manful  constancy  brought  her 
round  at  last  and  married  her,  from  him  we 
turn  our  eyes  to  the  Knight  of  the  Rueful 
Countenance.  Could  any  contrast  be  greater? 
In  those  two  is  one  more  commentary  on  the 
line  "to  him  that  hath  shall  be  given  and  from 


146     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

him  that  hath  not  shall  be  taken  away  even 
that  which  he  hath."  To  the  valiant  Addison 
success  finally  takes  its  course.  From  the 
doubtful  Esmond  all  things  desirable  flee 
away.  In  all  of  Addison's  doings  there  is  the 
quiet  rightness  which  comes  of  not  exaggera- 
ting their  importance.  To  every  act  of  Es- 
mond much  brooding  on  its  significance  has 
given  a  touch  of  unreality.  With  Addison 
things  come  right,  at  last,  because  he  is  enabled 
through  his  faith  that  in  the  long  run  noth- 
ing can  go  wrong,  to  be  patient,  to  endure 
misfortune,  and  to  seize  his  opportunity  when 
it  arises.  Esmond,  on  the  other  hand,  can 
never  get  his  way  because  he  never  can  be- 
lieve that  he  will  get  it — his  inclination  to  feel 
sorry  for  himself  is  always  drawing  him  off  to 
one  side  for  some  indulgence  in  self-pity — 
and  consequently  he  can  make  no  convincing 
impression  on  others.  Above  all,  in  every 
thought  of  Addison's,  there  is  the  belief  that 
behind  all  things  is  God's  love  and  therefore, 
dark  though  the  moments  may  appear,  let  not 
your  hearts  be  troubled.  For  Esmond,  at  the 
back  of  human  life,  there  is  nothing  but  the 
caprice  of  fortune  and  therefore  nothing  cer- 
tain in  this  world.  We  can  imagine  Addison, 
firm  in  his  conviction  that  life  is  not  an  acci- 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    147 

dent,  that  all  of  us  at  last  come  to  our  own,  ac- 
cepting cheerfully,  in  the  days  when  his  love 
affair  looked  the  darkest,  those  spirited  mod- 
ern lines 

"You'll  love  me  yet  and  I  can  tarry 
Your  love's  protracted  growing 
June  raised  that  bunch  of  flowers  you  carry 
From  seeds  of  April's  sowing." 

Who  could  imagine  Henry  Esmond  ap- 
proaching Beatrix  in  such  a  mood?  Nay, 
more,  we  can  imagine  Addison  looking  quietly 
into  himself,  inquiring  whether  something 
were  not  wrong  there  and  whether  the  woman 
so  far,  had  not  been  wise  in  holding  ofif. 
Henry  Esmond  could  no  more  have  made  such 
inquiry  than  he  could  have  changed  the  colour 
of  his  eyes.  It  is  Beatrix — always  Beatrix — 
only  Beatrix — who  is  to  blame  because  their 
affair  goes  wrong. 

In  Esmond  Thackeray  hit  a  subtle  perfec- 
tion of  art  not  at  all  like  the  simpler  "good 
story"  art  of  Vanity  Fairy  not  so  likely  to  be 
popular,  but  one  that  is  far  more  character- 
istic. The  book  can  hardly  be  said  to  have 
a  plot  but  it  certainly  has  a  unity.  This  unity 
suggests  painting  rather  than  literature.  I  be- 
lieve most  people,  if  they  examine  their  recol- 


148     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

lection  of  Esmond,  will  find  that  the  impres- 
sion is  not  so  much  of  a  scries  of  events  as  of 
a  group  of  figures.  The  more  we  study  this 
group  the  more  we  become  aware  of  the  signif- 
icance of  Addison.  The  effect  of  the  whole, 
its  richness,  its  rightness,  its  mellowness,  de- 
pends at  last  upon  that  beautiful  calm  figure 
in  the  background.  With  matchless  tact,  just 
as  the  curtain  falls,  our  eyes  are  brought 
around  to  this  figure  and  we  get  our  last  view 
of  Addison,  now  great  and  powerful,  in  a  be- 
nign attitude  of  protection.  After  the  utter 
failure  of  Esmond,  it  was  ^'by  the  kindness  of 
Mr.  Addison,"  that  "all  danger  of  prosecu- 
tion .  .  .  was  removed." 

The  History  of  Henry  Esmond  is  like  a 
painting  I  have  seen  somewhere  of  a  fall  of 
rain  beyond  which  is  a  landscape  while  far  in 
the  distance  upon  some  hills  the  sun  shines. 
At  first  glance  all  objects  in  the  picture  appear 
veiled  and  misty  with  the  rain.  But  on  closer 
study  we  become  able  to  allow  for  the  rain  as 
for  a  transparent  mask  and  through  it  we  make 
things  out  in  their  right  forms  and  range  them 
toward  the  sunshine  at  the  back.  So  with  this 
wonderful  novel.  The  gloomy  mood  of  the 
narrator,  his  false  conception  of  life,  fills  the 
foreground  of  the  picture  as  if  there  were  fall- 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     149 

ing  before  our  eyes  all  the  tears  of  the  world. 
At  first  sight  the  whole  scene  appears  to  chord 
with  his  own  dark  figure.  It  seems  to  be  a 
terrible  procession  of  conquerors,  beneath  a 
darkened  heaven,  moving  around  captured 
cities,  with  trumpets  and  armour  and  banners, 
doing  merciless  pagan  honour  to  Mars  and 
Venus.  However,  as  the  eye  grows  accus- 
tomed to  the  spectacle,  we  see  that  of  this  great 
assemblage  of  figures  not  all  are  in  the  region 
of  falling  tears.  Rank  after  rank,  they  range 
into  the  background,  growing  brighter  as  they 
recede,  and  then,  upon  a  sudden,  we  perceive 
that  at  the  back  of  all  is  a  world  of  calmness 
and  sunshine.  There,  the  remote  key  to  the 
whole  composition,  stands  the  beautiful  figure 
of  Addison. 

The  significance  of  The  History  of  Henry 
Esmond  is  thus  revealed.  As  a  piece  of  think- 
ing it  is  the  reductio  ad  absurdum  of  the  mood 
of  sentimentalism.  As  an  incident  in  Thack- 
eray's biography  it  marks  the  point  at  which 
he  grappled  with  that  evil  in  himself.  In 
writing  this  novel  he  forced  his  sentimentalism 
to  come  forth,  to  stand  apart  and  take  on  form 
so  that  he  might  see  it  plain  and  know  the  face 
of  his  enemy.  Then  he  cast  it  from  him  for- 
ever. 


CHAPTER  Vri 

READJUSTMENT 

THACKERAY  had  prepared  his  lec- 
tures  on  the  Humourists  with  an  eye 
to  a  tour  in  America.  He  sailed  from 
Boston  together  with  James  Russell  Lowell 
and  Arthur  Hugh  Clough,  October  30,  1852. 
Innumerable  anecdotes  are  told  of  his  Amer- 
ican sojourn.  Considering  the  purpose  of  the 
trip,  however,  the  main  point  is  that  he  went 
home,  in  the  spring  of  1853,  with  profits  that 
figured  up  to  £2500. 

He  remained  a  time  in  England,  then  went 
with  his  children  to  Switzerland.  The  sug- 
gestion of  a  novel  which  should  contain  cer- 
tain people  of  his  childhood  had  been  in  his 
mind  for  some  time  and  now,  thinking  upon 
what  he  should  do  next,  this  idea  began  to  take 
shape.  The  Newcomes  is  one  of  those  great 
works  which  came  into  being  in  the  mind  of 
the  author  almost  at  a  blow.  Thackeray's  own 
account  of  the  matter  is  in  the  epilogue  of  the 

novel  and  is  dated  'Taris  20th  June,  1855.'' 

150 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    151 

"Two  years  ago  walking  with  my  children 
in  some  pleasant  fields  near  to  Berne  in  Swit- 
zerland, I  strayed  from  them  into  a  little 
wood;  and,  coming  out  of  it  presently  told 
them  how  the  story  had  been  revealed  to  me 
somehow  which  for  three  and  twenty  months 
the  reader  has  been  pleased  to  follow." 

The  lover  of  Thackeray  may  be  pardoned 
for  lingering  with  fond  reverence  upon  the 
thought  of  that  day.  Mrs.  Ritchie's  account 
of  it  must  be  quoted:  "Some  moments  have 
their  special  characteristics,  and  I  can  still  re- 
member that  day,  and  the  look  of  the  fields  in 
which  we  were  walking,  and  the  silence  of  the 
hour,  and  the  faint,  sultry,  summer  mountains, 
with  the  open  wood  at  the  foot  of  the  sloping 
stubble.  My  father  had  been  silent  and  pre- 
occupied when  we  first  started,  and  was  walk- 
ing thoughtfully  apart.  We  waited  till  he 
came  back  to  us,  saying  he  now  saw  his  way 
quite  clearly,  and  he  was  cheerful  and  in  good 
spirits  as  we  returned  to  the  inn."  Plainly 
from  Mrs.  Ritchie's  further  account  the  novel 
was  already  begun.  She  continues,  "I  have  a 
notebook  of  his  for  1853  in  which  there  are 
some  memoranda  of  that  time.  We  were 
travelling  in  Switzerland  and  Germany.  We 
had  come  to  Baden  first  of  all  where  he  records 


152     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

various  excursions  and  drives,  and  notes  the 
books  which  he  is  reading,  as  well  as  the  people 
he  meets : — 

"7th  July  1853 — Began  preface  of  The 
Newcomes/^ 

The  fact  that  The  Newcomes  was  begun  at 
Baden  gives  a  speciaTlrrte^est^^o  that  gxouj) 
of  masterly  chapters,  'XXVllr-XXXIV, 
which  are  to  this  novel  What  "the  Brussels 
episode  is  to  Vanity  Fair.  In  those  chapters 
occurs  the  famous  ''Congress  of  Baden,"  that 
piece  of  high  diplomacy  in  which  Lady  Kew 
so  nearly  settles  things  for  all  branches  of 
the~"TsFewcome  family — so  nearly,  but  not 
quite. 

It  was  from  Baden,  on  his  forty-second 
birthday,  that  Thackeray  wrote  to  his 
mother: 

''Baden,  i8th  July,  1853.  ...  I  have  had 
a  hard  week's  work  and  am  in  No.  2  by  this 
time,  hoping  to  finish  said  number  before  the 
month  is  over:  but  I  can't  see  but  it  is  a  repe- 
tition of  past  performances  and  think  that 
vein  is  pretty  nigh  worked  out  in  me.  Never 
mind  .  .  .  this  is  not  written  for  glory  but 
for  quite  as  good  an  object,  namely  money 
which  will  profit  the  children  more  than 
reputation  when   there's   an   end  of  me  and 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    153 

money  and  reputation  are  alike  pretty  indif- 
ferent. .  .  .  Honest  old  Miss  Claphams  are 
here,  and  recall  the  days  of  my  youth  to  me. 
I  go  back  to  those  well-remembered  regions 
to  get  materials  for  the  commencement  of  the 
new  story.  One  of  Dickens'  immense  supe- 
riorities over  me  is  the  great  fecundity  of  his 
imagination.  .  .  ." 

Commenting  on  this  letter  Mrs.  Ritchie  re- 
marks, ''My  father  was  always  difBdent  about 
his  work,  especially  at  the  starting  of  it." 
His  diffidence  made  him  trouble  enough  but 
there  is  another  matter  touched  upon  in  that 
letter  of  his  forty-second  birthday  which  he, 
doubtless,  did  not  appreciate.  Though  he 
talks  of  Dickens'  "immense  superiority"  be- 
wailing his  own  lack  of  "fecundity,"  he 
should  have  been  thankful  on  that  ground. 
It  is  because  he  was  thrown  back  several 
times  upon  the  same  material  that  he  suc- 
ceeded, at  last,  in  working  out  of  it  all  the 
dross. 

In  the  autumn  of  1853,  Thackeray  was  at 
Paris  where  the  fifth  number  of  The  New- 
comes  was  finished.  Toward  the  end  of 
November  he  started  with  his  family  for 
Italy,  and  on  the  3rd  of  December  they  were 
in  Rome.-    He  worked  steadily,  Mrs.  Ritchie 


154     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

often  acting  as  his  amanuensis.  ^'On  one  oc- 
casion," she  tells  us,  "he  was  at  work  in  some 
room  in  which  he  slept,  high  up  in  an  hotel; 
the  windows  looked  upon  a  wide  and  pleas- 
ant prospect,  but  I  cannot  put  a  name  to  my 
remembrance:  and  then  he  walked  up  and 
down,  he  paused,  and  then  he  paced  the  room 
again,  stopping  at  last  at  the  foot  of  the  bed, 
where  he  stood  rolling  his  hands  over  the 
brass  ball  at  the  foot  of  the  bedstead.  He 
was  at  that  moment  dictating  the  scene  in 
which  poor  Jack  Belsize  pours  out  his  story 
to  Clive  and  J.  J.  at  Baden.  *Yes,'  my 
father  said  with  a  sort  of  laugh,  looking  down 
at  his  own  hand  (he  was  very  much  excited  at 
the  moment)  'that  is  just  the  sort  of  thing  a 
man  might  do  at  such  a  time.'  It  was  in  this 
room,  in  this  hotel  in  past  land,  that  he  chris- 
tened his  heroine,  still  walking  up  and  down 
the  room,  and  making  up  his  mind  what  her 
name  should  be." 

Following  up  the  wander  on  which  this 
great  book  was  written,  we  catch  a  glimpse  of 
Thackeray  at  Rome  walking  on  the  Prado 
*'with  .  .  .  Mr.  Pollen,  and  three  or  four 
monks  and  priests  in  their  robes."  Mrs. 
Ritchie  remembers  "writing  for  him  on  a 
marble  table  in  a  great  room  with  many  win- 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    155 

dows,  and  with  walls  hung  with  pictures  and 
ornamented  with  swinging  lamps  and  clas- 
sic columns,  where  pigeons  perched  on  the 
deep  window  sills,  voices  called  and  pif- 
ferari  droned  from  the  street  far  below  and 
charming  people  came  to  call  and  to  inter- 
rupt us — brides  and  bridegrooms,  beautiful 
ladies,  poets,  muses,  painters  with  beards  and 
cloaks.'^ 

From  these  words  we  turn  to  Chapter  XXXV 
of  The  Newcomes  and  find  that  ''J.  J.  and 
Clive  engaged  pleasant  lofty  apartments  in  the 
Via  Gregoriana.  Generations  of  painters  had 
occupied  these  chambers  and  gone  their  way. 
The  windows  of  their  painting  room  looked  in- 
to a  quaint  old  garden,  where  there  were  an- 
cient statues  of  the  Imperial  time,  a  babbling 
fountain  and  noble  orange  trees,  with  broad 
clustering  leaves  and  golden  balls  of  fruit,  glo- 
rious to  look  upon.  Their  walks  abroad  were 
endlessly  pleasant  and  delightful.  In  every 
street  there  were  scores  of  pictures  of  the  grace- 
ful, characteristic  Italian  life.  .  .  .  There 
were  the  children  at  play,  the  women  huddled 
round  the  steps  in  the  kindly  Roman  win- 
ter ..  .  There  came  the  red  troops,  the  blue 
troops  of  the  army  of  priests.  .  .  ."  How  en- 
thusiastically it  is  all  described  in  Clive's  let- 


156      THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

ter  to  his  father  which  is  the  bulk  of  the  chap- 
ter. 

The  visit  to  Rome  was  unfortunate  in  one 
respect  for  Thackeray  took  the  fever  and  his 
health  which  had  not  been  robust  since  his 
illness  in  1849  seems  never  to  have  been  fully 
restored.  Hereafter,  we  hear  of  fits  of 
^'spasms"  to  which  he  is  subject. 

Soon  after  he  got  up  from  the  fever  he 
heard  of  the  death  of  one  of  his  aunts.  The 
letter  which  he  wrote,  at  once,  to  her  daughter 
contains  a  paragraph  that  shows  how  far  he 
had  come  from  that  futile  bitterness  of  the 
days  of  his  first  manner.  ^'So  the  generations 
of  men  pass  away  and  are  called  rank  after 
rank  by  the  Divine  Goodness  out  of  reach  of 
time  and  age  and  grief  and  struggle  and  part- 
ing, leaving  these  to  their  successors,  who  go 
through  their  appointed  world-work,  and  are 
resumed  presently  by  the  Awful  Power  of  us 
all,  Whose  will  is  done  on  earth  as  it  is  in 
heaven,  Whose  kingdom  and  glory  are  forever 
and  ever." 

The  Thackeray  of  Vanity  Fair — the  dreary 
sentimentalist  with  his  everlasting  ^Which  of 
us  is  happy  in  this  world" — could  not  have 
written  those  words  and  believed  them.  Even 
as  the  earlier  novel  marches  ever  to  that  ca- 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    157 

dence  of  despair,  the  later  one  has  for  its  great 
chorus, — His  will  is  done  on  earth  as  it  is 
in  heaven.  Thus  is  measured  the  distance 
Thackeray  has  traversed  morally  since  the  end 
of  his  first  manner.  He  summed  it  up,  him- 
self, though  with  no  intention  to  do  so,  when 
he  wrote  about  that  same  time:  "So  the  father 
of  all  sends  illness,  death,  care,  grief,  out  of 
which  come  love,  steadfastness,  consolation, 
nor  could  these  things  have  been  if  men  had 
not  been  made  mortal,  and  even  erring  and 
sinful  and  wayward.  Suppose  Eve  had  not 
eaten  of  that  apple,  and  her  children  and  their 
papa  had  gone  on  living  forever  quite  happy 
in  a  smiling  paradisaical  nudity,  it  wouldn't 
have  been  half  the  world  it  is." 

Thackeray  returned  North  leaving  his 
daughters  with  their  grandparents  at  Paris 
and  went  on  alone  to  London.  He  gave  up  the 
house  in  Young  Street  where  so  much  of  his 
work  had  been  done  and  removed  to  36  Ons- 
low Square.  In  April,  1854,  he  wrote  that  he 
was  well  pleased  with  the  new  house;  he  de- 
scribed himself  'Spoking  about  for  furniture, 
,  .  .  leave  home  at  eleven  every  day  and 
don't  come  back  till  midnight.  I  had  a  fa- 
mous passage  and  a  good  dinner  and  sleep  at 
Folkstone,-  dined  at  the  Shakespeare  dinner 


158     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

here  on  Saturday,  and  am  very  glad  I  came,  if 
only  that  Dickens,  who  was  in  the  chair,  made 
a  complimentary  speech,  and  though  I  don't 
care  for  the  compliments,  I  do  for  the  good 
will  and  peace  among  men. 

"I  have  been  to  call  on  no  one,  but  dining 
with  old  cronies,  companion  bachelors.  .  .  .'' 

The  house  in  Onslow  Square  was  Thack- 
eray's home  for  the  next  seven  years  and  in 
it  was  written  the  latter  parts  of  The  New- 
comes,  the  Georges,  The  Virginians,  part  of 
Philip  and  many  of  the  Roundabout  Papers. 
*'The  result  of  my  father's  furnishing,"  says 
Mrs.  Ritchie,  "was  a  pleasant  bowery  sort  of 
home  with  green  curtains  and  carpets  looking 
out  upon  the  elm  trees  of  Onslow  Square." 

One  of  the  famous  anecdotes  of  Thackeray, 
one  of  those  which  really  gave  us  a  glimpse 
into  his  mind,  belongs  to  1854.  A  young  lady 
who  met  him  at  Coventry,  whither  he  had 
gone  to  lecture  on  "Charity  and  Humour," 
tells  the  story  thus: 

"He  was  the  Bray's  guest  and  would  you 
believe  it,  they  asked  me,  and  me  only,  to  tea, 
to  be  smuggled  in  as  one  of  themselves  with 
no  introduction  ...  he  usually  goes  to  an 
inn,  hating  to  be  made  a  lion  of,  but  the 
Lewes's  assured  him  that  the  Brays'  would  not 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    159 

lionise  him,  and  so  he  accepted  the  invitation. 
.  .  .  I  met  Miss  Hennell  in  the  garden,  who 
talked  in  an  undertone  as  if  fearful  of  disturb- 
ing the  lion,  who  was  then  in  his  room  writ- 
ing the  coming  number  of  The  Neufcomes, 
and  then  went  into  the  house  anxiously  await- 
ing his  appearance.  .  .  . 

*^At  last  he  came,  very  quietly,  but  such  a 
presence!  We  had  to  look  up  a  long  way,  he 
was  so  tall.  ...  He  talked  in  a  pleasant, 
friendly  way.  The  coming  number  of  The 
Newcomes  was  of  course  in  all  our  minds. 
Miss  Hennell,  as  our  spokeswoman,  said, 
'Mr.  Thackeray,  we  want  you  to  let  Clive 
marry  Ethel.  Do  let  them  be  happy.'  He 
was  surprised  at  our  interest  in  his  characters. 
What  a  fuss  you  make  about  my  yellow 
books,  here  in  the  country.  In  town,  no  one 
cares  for  them.  They  haven't  the  time.  The 
characters  once  created  lead  me  and  I  follow 
where  they  direct.  I  cannot  tell  the  events 
that  wait  on  Ethel  and  Clive.  .  .  .' 

"I  was  told  that  next  morning  when  they 
asked  him  whether  he  had  a  good  night  he 
answered,  *How  could  I  with  Colonel  New- 
come  making  a  fool  of  himself  as  he  has 
done.' " 

The  last  line  of  The  Newcomes  was  written 


160     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

at  Paris  "one  hot  summer's  day  in  the  Rue 
Godot  de  Mauroy,  in  a  big  shady  room  look- 
ing toward  the  street."  It  was  Thackeray's 
custom,  at  this  time,  though  he  dictated  much, 
to  set  down  the  supreme  passages  with  his  own 
hand.  "I  remember  writing  the  last  chapter 
of  The  Newcomes,''  says  Mrs.  Ritchie,  "to  my 
father's  dictation.  I  wrote  on  as  he  dictated 
more  and  more  slowly  until  he  stopped  short 
altogether,  in  the  account  of  Colonel  New- 
come's  last  illness,  when  he  said  that  he  must 
now  take  the  pen  into  his  own  hand,  and  sent 
me  away." 

Prophecy  is  a  dangerous  business,  but  I 
would  risk  a  good  deal  that  the  novel  which 
was  finished  that  "hot  summer's  day,"  in  the 
year  1855,  will,  as  time  goes  on,  be  left  with- 
out a  rival  save  Esmond  alone  for  the  first 
place  in  our  prose  fiction.  The  handling  is 
not  quite  so  brilliant  as  in  its  wonderful  prede- 
cessor; there  is  too  much  digression;  the  style 
has  not  the  early  morning  quality  of  the  first 
manner;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  all  the  vices 
of  Thackeray's  earlier  thinking  have  disap- 
peared; and  the  book  has  this  advantage  over 
Esmond  that  it  is  positive,  where  the  other 
was  negative;  it  builds  upon  the  ground 
which  Esmond  has  cleared;  as  to  details,  the 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    161 

style  is  pliant  and  noble,  the  portraits  mas- 
terly, the  tone,  though  grave,  both  hopeful 
and  courageous.  When  all  else  has  been  said 
there  remains  to  clinch  the  matter  the  constant 
presence  of  faith,  of  the  genuine  belief  that — 

"God's  in  his  heaven, 

All's  right  with  the  world." 

To  reckon  up  what  had  happened  in  Thack- 
eray's inner  life,  to  appreciate  his  transfor- 
mation, we  should  contrast  The  Newcomes 
with  Vanity  Fair.  The  career  of  the  heroine 
alone  contains  the  whole  story  of  the  enormous 
difference  between  the  moods  that  lie  behind 
the  two  books.  Remembering  that  in  Vanity 
Fair  sorrow  does  not  work  salvation,  we  are 
almost  startled  to  see  how  confident,  in  the 
later  work,  is  the  belief  that  ''the  Father  of 
all  sends  illness,  death,  care,  grief,  out  of 
which  come  love,  steadfastness,  consolation." 
And  all  this,  as  I  say,  is  summed  up  in  the 
career  of  Ethel  Newcome. 

We  meet  Titrr  fiist  ar^iTfilliant,  lovely,  im 
perious  child.  She  blossoms  into  a  superb 
young  beauty.  We  can  all  see  that  at  heart 
she  is  in  love  with  her  cousin  Clive  Newcome, 
who  is  always  in  love  with  her,  but  Miss 
Ethel,  through  her  mother,  is  of  the  world     I 


162     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

worldly,  while  her  father,  Sir  Brian,  is  but 
newly  established  there  and  his  brother,  the 
now  so  famous  old  Colonel  Newcome,  Clive's 
father,  is  hardly  of  the  world  at  all.  Ethel's 
brother  Barnes  is  a  pushing,  unscrupulous 
snob;  her  mother  a  nonentity;  her  grand- 
mother Lady  Kew,  now  as  famous  in  her  way 
as  the  Colonel,  is  the  real  head  of  the  house. 
A  match  between  Ethel  and  her  cousin  the 
Earl  of  Kew  is  the  goal  of  old  Lady  Kew's 
scheming  and  gets  so  near  to  success  that  the 
two  become  engaged.  Poor  Clive  takes  his 
defeat  bravely  in  the  midst  of  that  Baden  epi- 
sode which  makes  upon  the  reader  an  effect 
quite  as  impressive  and  even  more  natural 
and  convincing — if  I  may  be  allowed  to  say 
so — than  the  Brussels  episode  in  Vanity  Fair, 
The  two  love  stories  which  run  through  the 
book — the  story  of  Ethel  and  Clive  and  that 
of  Clara  Pulleyn  and  Jack  Belsize — are  en- 
tangled at  Baden  with  the  lesser  affair  of 
Ethel  and  Kew;  with  the  odious  scheming  of 
Clara's  impoverished  but  noble  family  who 
force  her  to  marry  Barnes  Newcome;  and 
with  the  wiles  of  the  detestable  Duchess 
d'lvry  who  here  pays  a  score  against  Kew. 
This  is  the  episode  of  The  Congress  of  Baden, 
told  in  seven  incomparable  chapters.    Tt  in- 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    163 

eludes  the  breaking  of  Ethel's  engagement  due, 
to  revelations  with  regard  to  Kew's  past  life 
that  are  slipped  into  her  knowledge  through 
the  craft  of  Madame  d'lvry. 

Having  broken  with  Kew,  whom  she  knew 
all  along  she  did  not  love,  Ethel  flings  her- 
self into  gaiety  and  now  Thackeray  gives  us 
the  real  thing  in  the  way  of  a  splendid  flirt. 
She  is  thus  described  by  Pendennis,  who  pur- 
ports to  be  the  author  of  the  book.  ^'I  must 
tell  you  that  this  arch  young  creature  had 
formed  the  object  of  my  observation  for  some 
months  past,  and  that  I  watched  her  as  I  have 
watched  a  beautiful  panther  at  the  Zoological 
Gardens,  so  bright  of  eye,  so  sleek  of  coat,  so 
slim  in  form,  so  swift  and  agile  in  her  spring. 

"A  more  brilliant  coquette  than  Miss  New- 
come,  in  her  second  season,  these  eyes  have 
never  looked  upon,  that  is  the  truth.  In  her 
first  year,  being  engaged  to  Lord  Kew,  she 
was  jDerhaps  a  little  rriore  reserved  and  quiet. 
Besides,  her  mother  went  out  with  her  that 
first  season,  to  whom  Miss  Newcome  except 
for  a  little  occasional  flightiness,  was  invari- 
ably obedient  and  ready  to  come  to  call.  But 
when  Lady  Kew  appeared  as  her  duenna, 
the  girl's  delight  seemed  to  be  to  plague  the 
old  lady,  and  she  would  dance  with  the  very 


1/4     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

(youngest  sons  merely  to  put  grandmamma  in 
a  passion.  In  this  way,  poor  young  Clubley 
.  .  .  actually  thought  that  Ethel  was  in  love 
with  him.  .  .  .  Young  Tandy,  of  the  Temple, 
Lord  Skibbereen's  younger  son,  who  sat  in 
the  House  for  some  time  on  the  Irish  Catholic 
side,  .  .  .  would  entertain  me  with  his  ad- 
miration and  passion  for  her. 
"  ^If  you  have  such  a  passion  for  her,  why 
not  propose?'  it  was  asked  of  Mr.  Tandy. 
"Tropose!  Propose  to  a  Russian  arch- 
duchess,' cries  young  Tandy.  ^She's  beauti- 
es ful,  she's  delightful,  she's  witty.  I  have  never 
seen  anything  like  her  eyes;  they  send  me  wild 
— wild,'  says  Tandy  (slapping  his  waistcoat 
under  Temple  Bar) — 'but  a  more  audacious 
little  flirt  never  existed  since  the  days  of 
Cleopatra.'  " 

To  this  girl  Clive  returns  from  Rome, — 
where  he  and  J.  J.  are  still  trying  to  be 
painters, — the  moment  he  hears  she  has  broken 
her  engagement.  And  now  ensues  a  long 
period  in  which,  as  it  seems  to  me,  there  is  a 
distinct  reniiniscence-of  Beatrix  and  Henry 
Esmond.  Clive  is  not  near  so  bad  as  the  mel- 
ancholy Colonel,  but  just  the  same  he  is  not 
quite  right.  To  his  great  hurt  a  piece  of  Es- 
mond has  got  dissolved  in  him  and  therefore 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     165 

Clive  Newcome  must  suffer  long  before  he 
comes  to  his  own.  Be  this  as  it  may,  however, 
he  fails  with  Ethel  though  her  tenderness  for 
him  is  plain  to  the  reader  if  not  to  the  young 
people  themselves  and  Ethel,  who  a  year  be- 
fore flung  over  Kew  because  of  his  morals, 
engages  herself  to  the  utterly  worthless,  but 
enormously  rich,  young  Marquis  of  Farin- 
tosh. 

Af  the  opening  of  Chapter  LI  1 1  we  are  re- 
minded of  an  unhappy  love  affair  in  the  youth 
of, Clivers  father.  ''If  my  gentle  reader  has 
had  sentimental  disappointments,  he  or  she  is 
aware  that  the  friends  who  have  given  him 
most  sympathy  under  these  calamities  have 
been  persons  who  have  had  dismal  histories 
of  their  own  at  some  time  of  their  lives  and  I 
conclude  Colonel  Newcome  in  his  early  days 
must  have  suffered  very  cruelly  in  that  affair 
of  which  we  have  a  slight  cognisance,  or  he 
would  not  have  felt  so  very  much  anxiety  about 
Clive's  condition."  This  is  by  way  of  prelude 
to  a  furious  quarrel  between  the  Colonel  and 
his  nephew  Barnes,  who  has  kept  him  in  the 
dark  about  Ethel's  movements  while  the  old 
man  has  endeavoured  to  compass  the  financial 
side  of  an  alliance  with  Miss  Newcome.  By 
this  quarrel,  the  two  branches  of  the  family 


166     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

are  separated  and  now  the  weakness  in  Clive 
comes  out.  His  poor  dear  father — of  whom 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson  said  that  if  the  whole 
race  of  gentlemen  should  disappear,  the  type 
could  be  restored  from  this  one  figure — though 
a  beautiful  character  has  a  vein  of  weakness 
which  has  descended  to  his  son.  The  Col- 
onel's one  love  afifair  was  not  with  Clive's 
mother,  who,  if  truth  be  told,  was  not  a  pleas- 
ant person  and  married  that  gentle  soldier,  in 
his  disconsolate  early  days,  after  the  failure 
of  his  real  love,  chiefly  by  virtue  of  being  his 
superior  in  will  power.  In  Chapter  LVI,  we 
see  the  pitiful  side  of  poor  Clive:  we  see,  too, 
how  artfully  the  dreadful  Mrs.  Mackenzie  is 
laying  siege  to  him  in  his  misery  for  her  little 
fool  of  a  Rosy;  we  wonder  whether  Clive,  like 
his  father,  like  Henry  Esmond,  will  make  one 
of  those  marriages  of  consolation  which 
are  so  likely  before  they  are  done  to  spell 
ruin. 

Another  marriage  has  meantime  gone 
wrong.  Clara  PuUeyn  has  found  Barnes  un- 
endurable and  has  run  off  with  her  old  love 
who  is  now  Lord  Highgate.  This  event 
brings  Ethel  to  her  senses.  Her  own  marriage 
with  the  Marquis  would  have  been  of  the  same 
nature  as  Clara's  with  Barnes  and  now  the 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    167 

horror  of  such  marriage  falls  upon  her.  She 
breaks  off  her  engagement,  withdraws  from 
society,  and  spends  her  time  in  the  country 
taking  care  of  her  younger  brothers  and  sisters 
and  Barnes'  neglected  children.  The  two 
short  Chapters  LX  and  LXI  contain  a  second 
general  crisis.  Laura  Pendennis  here  at- 
tempts to  bring  Clive  back — even  as  he  came 
of  his  own  accord  after  the  break  with  Kew — 
and  not  only  Laura  but  every  reader  of  the 
book  can  see  that  Ethel  has  found  her  heart 
at  last  and  this  is  Clive's  day.  But,  alas!  the 
weak  strain  in  the  Newcomes,  father  and  son 
— the  Esmond  strain — has  borne  fruit  and  they 
must  pay  for  it.  Laura  does  not  hear  of 
Clive's  fatal  error  directly  but  through  a  let- 
ter from  his  father  to  an  old  dependent  with 
whom  Laura  and  Ethel — who  by  now  are 
great  friends — have  an  interview.  Ethel's  in- 
terest in  this  old  servant  of  her  uncle's  is  made 
pointedly  suggestive.  On  that  day  old  Mrs. 
Mason  must  produce  the  letter  she  has  just 
received  from  her  dear  Colonel  and  in  this 
letter  is  the  news  of  Clive's  marriage  with 
Rosy  Mackenzie. 

"Keziah  must  have  thought  there  was  some- 
thing between  Clive  and  my  wife,  for  when 
Laura  had  read  the  letter  she  laid  it  down 


168     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

upon  the  table  and  sitting  down  by  it,  and 
hiding  her  face  in  her  hands,  burst  into  tears. 

''Ethel  looked  steadily  at  the  two  pictures 
of  Clive  and  his  father.  Then  she  put  her 
hand  on  her  friend's  shoulder.  'Come,  my 
dear,'  said  she,  'it  is  growing  late  and  I  must 
go  back  to  my  children.'  And  she  saluted 
Mrs.  Mason  and  her  maid  in  a  very  stately 
manner  and  left  them,  leading  my  wife  away, 
who  was  still  exceedingly  overcome." 

There  ensues  a  period  of  Ethel's  life  in 
which  she  gives  herself  up  to  the  service  of 
others.     Not  in  her  is  any  trace  of  sentimen- 
talism,   of   any   luxuriating  in   her   sorrows. 
/T^his  strong  spirit  could  go  wrong  deliberately 
(   as  ^^^!Teir*lire'"ehgaged   herself   to   Farintosh, 
\  knowing  what  she  was  doing — as  Beatrix  did 
\with  HamiltonVbut  for  her  the  brooding  self- 
absorption  of  Esmond,  or  Clive's  surrender  to 
the  wiles  of  a  consoler,  are  impossible.     In  the 
best  vein  of  the  third  manner  is  that  Chapter 
LXII  in  which  the  story  pauses  during  a  grand 
chorus  upon  the  situation  of  all  the  persons. 
Here  is  the  account  of  Ethel.     "Her  charities 
increased  daily  with  her  means  of  knowing 
the  people  round  about  her.     She  gave  much 
time  to  them  and  thought;  visited  from  house 
to  house  without  ostentation:  was  awe-stricken 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     169 

by  that  spectacle  of  the  poverty,  which  we  have 
with  us  always,  of  which  the  sight  rebukes  our 
selfish  griefs  into  silence,  the  thought  compels 
us  to  charity,  humility  and  devotion.  .  .  . 
Death,  never  dying  out;  hunger  always  crying 
and  children  born  to  it  day  after  day, — our 
young  London  lady,  flying  from  the  splendours 
and  follies  in  which  her  life  had  been  passed, 
found  herself  in  the  presence  of  these:  thread- 
ing darkling  alleys  which  swarmed  with 
wretched  life;  sitting  by  naked  beds,  whither 
by  God's  blessing  she  was  sometimes  enabled 
to  carry  a  little  comfort  and  consolation  and 
whence  she  came  heart-stricken  by  the  over- 
powering misery,  or  touched  by  the  patient 
resignation  of  the  new  friends  to  whom  fate 
had  directed  her.  And  here  she  met  the  priest 
upon  his  shrift,  the  homely  missionary  bear- 
ing his  words  of  consolation,  the  quiet  curate 
pacing  his  round,  and  was  known  to  all  these, 
and  was  enabled  now  and  again  to  help  their 
people  in  trouble.  'Oh!  what  good  there  is  in 
this  woman!'  my  wife  would  say  to  me  as  she 
laid  one  of  Miss  Ethel's  letters  aside:  Vho 
would  have  thought  this  was  the  girl  of  your 
glaring  London  ballroom?  If  she  has  had 
grief  to  bear,  how  it  has  chastened  and  im- 
proved her!' " 


170     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAIVIA  IN 

The  closing  quarter  of  the  book  is  full  of 
utter  sadness  but  also  of  the  tenderest  faith  and 
pity.  The  miserable  married  life  of  Clive 
forms  a  verdict  on  the  marriage  of  consola- 
tion— which,  when  we  analyse  it,  is  as  selfish 
in  its  way  as  the  marriage  of  convenience. 
Clive  committed  one  of  these  great  errors; 
Barnes  the  other.  With  equal  hand  Thack- 
eray weighs  them  both  and  finds  them  wanting. 
And  all  through  this  dark  part  of  the  story 
Ethel  is  the  ministering  angel.  There  is  no 
scene  in  Thackeray  at  once  so  unhappy  and  so 
tender  as  the  reconciliation  of  Ethel  and  her 
uncle,  at  Clive's  house,  shortly  before  Rosy's 
death.  Of  the  death  of  Colonel  Newcome  all 
the  world  knows. 

Again  let  us  turn  back  to  Vanity  Fair  and 
listen  to  that  tone  of  hopelessness  as  the  story 
dies  away  and  we  see  Dobbin  '^seizing  up  his 
little  Janey,  of  whom  he  is  fonder  than  of  any- 
thing in  the  world — fonder  even  than  of  his 
History  of  the  Punjaub. 

"  Tonder  than  he  is  of  me,'  Emmy  thinks 
with  a  sigh.  But  he  never  said  a  word  to 
Amelia  that  was  not  kind  and  gentle,  or 
thought  of  a  want  of  hers  that  he  did  not  try 
to  gratify. 

"Ah!  Vanitas  Vanitatum!  which  of  us  is 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    171 

happy  in  this  world?  which  of  us  has  his  de- 
sire? or  having  it  is  satisfied? — Come,  chil- 
dren, let  us  shut  up  the  box  and  the  puppets 
for  the  play  is  played  out." 

From  this  beautiful  but  pernicious  writing 
we  return  to  the  epilogue  of  The  Newcomes, 
where  in  such  a  playful  way  Thackeray  sets 
us  at  rest  about  the  final  happiness  of  Clive 
and  Ethel  and  after  pretending  to  be  uncertain, 
concludes  '^my  belief,  then,  is  that  in  Fable- 
land  somewhere  Ethel  and  Clive  are  living 
most  comfortably  together:  that  she  is  im- 
mensely fond  of  his  little  boy  and  a  great  deal 
happier  now  than  they  would  have  been  had 
they  married  at  first  when  they  took  a  liking 
to  each  other  as  young  people." 

Can  this  be  the  Thackeray  of  Vanity  Fair? 
this  man  who  has  built  up  his  stupendous 
novel  on  the  theme  expressed  in  those  words 
of  his  own,  "the  Father  of  all  sends  illness, 
death,  care  and  grief  out  of  which  come  love, 
steadfastness,  consolation."  Yes,  the  two  are 
the  same,  or  rather  the  one  has  died  and  has 
been  resurrected  into  the  other.  In  this  fact  is 
the  greatness  of  Thackeray's  life  as  a  man — 
that  great  life  whose  noble,  later  mood  was 
summed  up  in  the  words  of  a  prayer  which  he 
wrote  and  showed  to  a  friend  who  has  thus 


172    THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY 

preserved  it,  in  part,  from  memory:  ^'He 
prayed  that  he  might  never  write  a  word  incon- 
sistent with  the  love  of  God  or  the  love  of  man : 
that  he  might  never  propagate  his  own  preju- 
dices or  pander  to  those  of  others:  that  he 
might  always  speak  the  truth  with  his  pen,  and 
that  he  might  never  be  actuated  by  a  love  of 
greed.  I  particularly  remember  that  the 
prayer  wound  up  with  the  words:  ^For  the 
sake  of  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord.' '.' 


CHAPTER  VIII 

FOLLOWING   "THE   NEWCOMES " 

WHEREVER  we  place  The  New- 
comes  as  art  it  was  Thackeray's 
greatest  success  financially,  and  he 
appears  to  have  derived  from  it  no  less  than 
£4000.  Though  this  was  not  a  great  sum  in 
comparison  with  the  sums  paid  to  Dickens, 
it  signifies  an  extended  popular  interest. 
Thackeray  had  captured  his  audience. 

However,  he  did  not  allow  himself  to  pause 
in  his  labours  but  prepared  for  another  busi- 
ness venture  in  America.  This  time  his  stock 
in  trade  was  the  set  of  lectures  on  The  Four 
Georges.  A  farewell  dinner,  with  Dickens  in 
the  chair,  was  tendered  him  by  sixty  friends, 
October  11,  1855. 

Of  this  second  American  sojourn  there  is 
one  anecdote  that  must  be  told.  At  Philadel- 
phia "owing  to  the  lateness  of  the  season,"  his 
lecture  was  a  failure.  The  person  financially 
responsible  was  a  "sad,  pale-faced  young  man," 
who  lost  money  on  the  venture.     Thackeray 

173 


174      THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAJIA  IN 

pitied  him  to  the  extent  of  leaving  behind 
sufficient  funds  to  make  good  his  losses. 

This  portion  of  Thackeray's  life  includes  an- 
other curious  attempt — the  third  and  last — to 
digress  from  the  plain  course  of  his  natural 
fitness.  In  1857  he  stood  for  Parliament,  as  a 
Liberal,  at  Oxford.  As  a  political  speaker  he 
is  said  to  have  done  fairly  well — far  better 
than  one  might  expect  of  a  man  of  his  tempera- 
ment— and  the  episode  is  further  remembered 
for  a  bit  of  repartee.  His  opponent,  Mr. 
(afterward  Lord)  Cardwell,  meeting  Thack- 
eray one  day,  made  the  trite  remark  that  he 
hoped  the  best  man  would  win.  ^^No,"  said 
Thackeray,  "I  hope  not."  The  vote  went 
against  him,  1,085  ^^  1,018.  He  took  the  de- 
feat gracefully  and  in  a  farewell  speech  de- 
clared that  he  would  retire  to  his  desk  and 
^4eave  to  Mr.  Cardwell  a  business  that  I  am 
sure  he  understands  much  better  than  I  do." 

He  took  himself  at  his  word  and  in  Novem- 
ber, 1857,  brought  out  the  first  number  of  The 
Virginians.  The  last  number  appeared  in 
October,  1859.  His  health  was  not  good  and 
may  account  for  the  fact  that  The  Virginians 
is  not  sustained.  One  episode — Harry  War- 
rington at  Tunbridge  Wells — is  done  with  his 
whole  strength.     None  of  the  book,  is  poor. 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    175 

Throughout  it  shows  the  sanity,  the  sweetness 
of  his  third  manner  which  had  flowered  so 
splendidly  in  The  Newcomes.  Nevertheless, 
as  a  whole  it  reveals  a  distinct,  but  as  events 
proved  only  a  temporary,  decline  of  power. 

A  detail  of  the  same  period,  sadder  than  the 
lapse  of  power,  was  a  quarrel  with  Edmund 
Yates,  which  widened  into  a  quarrel  with 
Dickens,  of  which  scandal-mongers  have  made 
much.  It  was  all  about  a  silly  article  by  Yates 
describing  Thackeray  who  was  so  mortified 
that  he  appealed  to  the  committee  of  the  Gar- 
rick  Club  on  the  ground  that  Yates  had  made 
use  of  facts  he  could  not  have  known  except 
as  a  member  of  the  club.  Dickens  attempted 
to  mediate.  He  was  not  successful.  Yates 
was  forced  to  leave  the  club  and  an  estrange- 
ment arose  between  Thackeray  and  Dickens 
which  lasted  several  years.  It  terminated  only 
a  few  days  before  Thackeray's  death  when  they 
met  on  the  steps  of  the  Athenaeum  and 
spontaneously  shook  hands. 

The  events  of  Thackeray's  life  subsequent  to 
the  appearance  of  The  Newcomes  culminated 
in  the  establishment  of  the  Cornhill  Magazine 
with  Thackeray  as  its  editor.  His  reputation 
was  by  now  so  great  that  when  it  was  known 
he  would  edit  the  new  magazine,  the  report 


176     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

made  a  literary  sensation.  The  first  number, 
January,  i860,  sold  a  hundred  thousand  copies. 

It  is  said  that  he  intended  to  open  the  Corn- 
hill  with  the  first  number  of  a  great  novel  by 
himself  but  having  allowed  other  matters  to  in- 
terfere he  felt  he  could  not  get  it  in  hand  and 
therefore,  at  rather  a  late  hour,  called  on  Trol- 
lope  to  take  his  place.  His  own  contribution 
for  January,  i860,  was  the  first  number  of 
Lovel  the  Widower,  a  slight  performance 
which  ran  only  six  months. 

However,  Thackeray  carried  out  his  inten- 
tion after  all.  In  January,  1861,  appeared  the 
first  number  of  Philip  which  ran  until  Au- 
gust, 1862.  This  book,  now  so  strangely  neg- 
lected, is  one  of  his  great  productions.  Many 
people  have  assumed  that  it  must  be  poor  for 
no  reason,  apparently,  except  that  when 
Thackeray  wrote  it  he  was  growing  old.  Such 
people  forget  that  the  Roundabout  Papers 
written  at  this  same  time  are  perhaps  the 
height  of  Thackeray  as  a  stylist.  How  to  ac- 
count for  the  heresy  that  Philip  is  a  feeble 
work — a  ''shadow"  of  the  early  books,  Mr. 
Whibley  calls  it — is  a  problem.  I  can  find 
no  explanation  but  the  conventional  idea  that 
a  writer  like  a  wave  must  rise  to  an  apex  and 
then  decline  and  hence  that  his  later  work 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     177 

must  necessarily  be  poor.  Sometimes  this  is 
true  but  not  always.  As  to  Philip,  I  main- 
tain that  it  reaches  the  very  highest  pitch  of 
comedy  Thackeray  ever  attained.  Philip's 
love  affair  at  Paris,  and  the  duel  of  the  brandy 
bottles,  transcends  the  affair  of  Pen  and  the 
Fotheringay  by  just  the  extent  to  which  the 
wholesomeness  of  Thackeray's  mood  in  1861 
exceeded  that  of  1849.  In  this  comedy  there  is 
none  of  the  underlying  bitterness  which,  sooner 
or  later,  for  every  discerning  reader,  becomes 
visible  through  the  shimmer  of  the  first  man- 
ner and  turns  its  light  into  darkness.  The 
comedy  of  Philip  is  pure  wholesome  laughter 
issuing  from  the  conviction  that  God  knows 
what  he  is  about  with  his  world,  and  there- 
fore his  creatures  may  be  merry  even  in  their 
misfortunes;  that  if  they  but  keep  their  cour- 
age up  all  things  will  at  last  work  together 
for  good. 

It  is  a  fortunate  coincidence  that  Thack- 
eray's third  manner,  like  his  first,  closes  with 
a  novel  on  youth.  The  careers  of  Arthur 
Pendennis  and  Philip  Firmin  are,  so  far  as 
mere  events  go,  wonderfully  alike.  Who 
knows  the  story  of  one,  knows  in  the  main  the 
story  of  the  other.  And  yet  no  books  by  the 
same   hand- were   ever   further  apart.     Pen- 


178     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

dennis  for  all  its  external  brilliancy  is  worm- 
eaten  at  the  core.  Philip  is  a  ripe  apple, 
beautiful  without  and  sound  within. 

The  remaining  events  of  Thackeray's  life 
may  be  briefly  told.  He  was  editor  of  the 
Cornhill  until  March,  1862,  when  he  resigned. 
According  to  report  he  was  not  a  successful 
editor.  He  appears  to  have  lacked  system  in 
his  work  and  also  was  too  soft  hearted  with 
poor  contributors  who  needed  money.  The 
hardship  of  editing,  as  he  conceived  it,  was  the 
necessity  to  reject  the  work  of  the  unfortunate. 
In  his  essay.  Thorns  in  the  Cushion  he  makes 
a  humorous  confession  of  how  hard  he  found 
the  task.  With  the  successful  people  of  letters 
he  had  no  compunctions.  Both  Trollope  and 
Mrs.  Browning  received  rejections  at  his  hands 
because  of  their  subject  matter,  Thackeray  as- 
serting that  the  contributions  in  question  would 
offend  the  public. 

In  February,  1862,  Thackeray  moved  into  a 
house  which  he  had  built — 2  Palace  Green, 
Kensington — in  the  wall  of  which  there  is  now 
a  memorial  tablet.  At  the  house  warming,  on 
the  twenty-fourth  of  the  month,  his  attempt  at 
a  play.  The  Wolves  and  The  Lamb,  was  acted 
by  amateurs,  Thackeray  appearing  at  the  end 
of  the  performance  to  say  a  ^'God  bless  you" 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     179 

in  pantomime.  He  lived  in  this  house  nearly 
two  years.  Though  not  rich  he  closed  his 
life  in  prosperity  and  Sir  Leslie  Stephen  says 
that  his  receipts  from  the  Cornhill  amounted 
to  4,000  pounds  yearly.  Trollope  says:  "A 
little  before  his  death,  Thackeray  told  me  that 
he  had  succeeded  in  replacing  the  fortune 
which  he  had  lost  as  a  young  man.  He  had, 
in  fact,  done  better,  for  he  left  an  income  of 
seven  hundred  and  fifty  pounds  behind  him." 
He  was  found  dead  in  his  bed  on  the  morn- 
ing of  the  day  before  Christmas,  1863.  He 
had  been  ailing  for  some  time  and  the  night 
previous  had  gone  to  bed  early  saying  he  was 
not  well.  The  immediate  cause  of  death  was 
an  effusion  into  the  brain.  Thackeray  was 
buried  January  30,  in  the  cemetery  at  Kensal 
Green.  A  bust  of  him,  by  Marochetti,  was 
speedily  set  up  in  Westminster. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE  FINAL  TRIUMPH 

ELEVATED  as  The  Newcomes  is  in 
moral  tone  Thackeray  went  above  it 
in  the  novel  w^hich  he  left  unfinished 
— the  splendid  fragment  of  Denis  Duval. 
In  The  Newcomes,  though  it  is  one  of  those 
few  great  works  of  art  whose  fundamental  mo- 
tive is  the  acquisition  of  faith,  we  are  still 
aware  of  the  struggle  that  has  led  up  to  the 
faith.  The  battle  is  over  but  the  roar  of  it 
still  rings  in  our  ears,  the  horror  of  it  still  lives 
in  our  nerves.  In  Denis  Duval  the  very 
memory  of  the  battle  has  been  put  aside:  we 
are  set  securely  upon  a  pinnacle  whence  we 
view  the  entire  field  of  Life  and  behold  all  the 
parts  of  it  related  in  a  single  design,  the  mean- 
ing of  which  is  that  His  will  is  done  on  earth 
as  it  is  in  heaven. 

This  intention  to  insist  upon  the  final  right- 
ness  of  Life  affects  the  method  of  telling  the 
story.  Like  Esmond  it  is  an  autobiography 
but  unlike  Esmond  it  assures  us  at  the  start 

i8o 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     181 

that  however  dark  may  be  the  shadows 
through  which  if  we  follow  it  we  must  jour- 
ney, the  end  of  all  will  be  happiness.  Ad- 
miral Duval,  sitting  down  to  the  composition 
of  his  memoirs,  reveals  himself  as  a  serene, 
humorous  old  gentleman  who  can  look  upon 
his  troubled  past  with  a  contented  smile. 
Mentioning  little  Agnes,  whom  he  knew  as  a 
child,  he  adds: 

"And  who,  pray,  was  Agnes?  To-day  her 
name  is  Agnes  Duval  and  she  sits  at  her  work- 
table  hard  by.  The  lot  of  my  life  has  been 
changed  by  knowing  her.  To  win  such  a  prize 
in  life's  lottery  is  given  but  to  very  few. 
What  I  have  done  (of  any  worth)  has  been 
done  in  trying  to  deserve  her."  The  admiral 
is  a  risen  man  sprung  from  a  plain  stock  and 
this  gives  point  to  his  next  sentence:  "I  might 
have  remained,  but  for  her,  in  my  humble  na- 
tive lot,  to  be  neither  honest  nor  happy,  but 
that  my  good  angel  yonder  succoured  me.  All 
I  have  I  owe  to  her;  but  I  pay  with  all  I  have, 
and  what  creature  can  do  more?" 

These  sentences  close  the  first  chapter  and 
form  the  keynote  of  the  book.  The  ideas  con- 
tained in  them  are  the  chorus  to  which  the 
whole  event  moves.  Thackeray  is  now  secure 
in  his  faith  that  Life  is  right  at  bottom ;  that 


182     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

no  good  is  ever  lost  out  of  life  but  somewhere 
in  some  way  bears  fruit;  that  Love  is  the  su- 
preme fact,  and  the  secret  of  Love  is  not  to 
get  but  to  give.  Fifteen  years  before,  when 
Thackeray  drew  Dobbin  and  Amelia,  he  had 
not  learned  that  lesson.  In  those  days  of 
his  bitterness  he  could  say  that  Dobbin  should 
get  Amelia  and  find  when  he  had  got  her  that 
she  was  not  worth  having.  At  the  back  of 
his  mind  was  still  the  unconverted  pagan  con- 
ception of  Love — that  it  is  a  game  played  for 
a  stake  and  that  it  is  worth  while  or  the  re- 
verse according  as  the  stake  won  comes  up 
to,  or  falls  below,  the  expectation  of  the 
gamester.  This  conception  of  Love  is  one 
element  in  that  natural  man  who  must  die  to 
the  spiritual  man  in  order  to  get  a  true  un- 
derstanding of  the  words — "Greater  love  than 
this  hath  no  man  that  he  lay  down  his  life  for 
his  friend." 

Remembering  Dobbin  and  Amelia  mar- 
ried; remembering  the  fifteen  years,  the  sor- 
row, the  struggle,  the  victory,  that  separate 
Vanity  Fair  from  Denis  Duval;  we  under- 
stand why  Thackeray  slips  into  the  second 
chapter,  after  the  admiral  has  been  comment- 
ing on  Agnes'  childhood,  this  paragraph: 

''That  daughter  is  sitting  before  me  now — 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    183 

with  spectacles  on  nose  too — very  placidly 
spelling  the  Portsmouth  paper  where  I  hope 
she  will  soon  read  the  promotion  of  Monsieur 
Scapegrace,  her  son.  She  has  exchanged  her 
noble  name  for  mine  which  is  only  humble 
and  honest.  My  dear!  your  eyes  are  not  so 
bright  as  once  I  remember  them,  and  the 
raven  locks  are  streaked  with  silver.  To 
shield  thy  head  from  dangers  has  been  the 
blessed  chance  and  duty  of  my  life.  When  I 
turn  towards  her,  and  see  her  moored  in  our 
harbour  of  rest,  after  our  life's  checkered  voy- 
age, calm  and  happy,  a  sense  of  immense  grati- 
tude fills  my  being,  and  my  heart  says  a  hymn 
of  praise." 

When  the  melancholy  Colonel  Esmond  sat 
down  to  the  composition  of  his  memoirs,  he 
also,  revealed  his  mood  at  the  beginning.  The 
contrast  between  the  stout  old  admiral  and  the 
Knight  of  the  Rueful  Countenance  is  worth 
observing.  ^T  have  seen  too  much  of  suc- 
cess in  life,"  says  the  Colonel,  in  his  sour 
loftiness,  ^'to  take  ofif  my  hat  and  huzza  as  it 
passes  in  its  gilt  coach  ...  Is  it  the  Lord 
Mayor  going  in  state  to  mince  pies  and  the 
Mansion  House?  Is  it  poor  Jack  of  New- 
gate's procession,  with  the  sheriff  and  javelin 
men  conducting  hi  mon  his  last  journey  to  Ty- 


184      THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

burn?  I  look  into  my  heart  and  think  I  am 
as  good  as  my  Lord  Mayor,  and  know  I  am  as 
bad  as  Tyburn  Jack.  Give  me  a  chain  and  a 
red  gown  and  a  pudding  before  me,  and  I 
could  play  the  part  of  alderman  very  well, 
and  sentence  Jack  after  dinner.  Starve  me, 
keep  me  from  books  and  honest  people,  edu- 
cate me  to  love  dice,  gin  and  pleasure,  and  put 
me  on  Hounslow  Heath  with  a  purse  before 
me  and  I  will  take  it.  And  'I  shall  be  de- 
servedly hanged,'  say  you,  wishing  to  put  an 
end  to  this  prosing.  I  don't  say  no.  I  can't 
but  accept  the  world  as  I  find  it,  including  a 
rope's  end,  as  long  as  it  is  in  the  fashion." 

We  can  imagine  the  satisfaction  with  which 
Esmond,  the  everlasting  poser,  who  could 
never  cease  from  acting  a  part  before  himself, 
penned  those  words.  In  his  shallow  mind 
they  were  a  stately  condescension  to  the  frail- 
ties of  mankind.  And  what  an  attitude  he 
struck  when  he  wrote  them !  Did  he  not  show 
his  superiority  by  deigning  to  include  himself 
in  this  railing  accusation  which  he  masks  with 
a  smile?  So  he  thinks;  so  he  expects  the 
world  to  think.  And  we  must  admit  that  it 
is  a  seductive  philosophy, — this  notion  that  we 
are  all  the  victims  of  circumstances,  that  our 
conditions  and  not  ourselves,  must  bear  the 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     185 

blame,  as  well  as  take  the  credit,  both  for  our 
evil  and  our  good.  That  philosophy  is  the 
key  to  Esmond's  life.  It  was,  also,  to  a  great 
extent,  the  key  to  the  century  in  which  the  au- 
thor of  Esmond  lived,  which  he  expressed 
more  truly  than  did  any  of  his  rivals.  What 
the  creation  of  Hamlet  was  to  the  Renais- 
sance— the  supreme  expression  of  its  source  of 
danger — that,  allowing  for  the  difference  be- 
tween Shakespeare  and  Thackeray,  the  crea- 
tion of  Esmond  has  been  to  our  own  time. 
We  have  seen  how,  in  Thackeray,  the  expres- 
sion of  the  danger  was  the  means  of  deliver- 
ance from  it;  how  he  passed  on,  his  work  of 
destruction  being  accomplished,  and  reared 
anew  the  spiritual  world.  The  Newcomes — 
fantastic  as  this  assertion  may  appear  to  some 
— is  the  epic  of  the  recovery  by  the  modern 
world  of  the  sense  of  faith.  In  Denis  Duval, 
had  Thackeray  lived  to  finish  it,  we  should 
have  had  a  serene  presentment  of  the  new 
heaven  and  the  new  earth  after  all  the  turmoil 
of  the  night  time  had  been  lost  in  pure  dawn. 
In  this  connection  especial  significance  at- 
taches to  the  character  of  the  clergyman.  Dr. 
Bernard.  That  scene,  in  the  fourth  chapter 
of  Denis  Duval  where  the  doctor  refuses  to 
take  the  hand  of  the  Chevalier  de  le  Motte,  is 


186     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

one  of  Thackeray's  master-strokes.  It  should 
be  set  over  against  the  first  chapter  of  the 
second  book  of  Henry  Esmond  as  a  contrast 
between  conviction  and  sentimentality.  The 
old  clergyman,  kind  and  fearless,  but  com- 
manding, sees  life  clearly,  and  estimates  people 
correctly,  chiefly  through  expelling  himself 
from  his  calculations.  Consequently,  he  can 
act  With  a  decisive  firmness  that  hits  the  true 
solution  of  every  case.  Where  it  is  right  to 
be  so,  he  is  as  gentle  as  a  woman ;  and  where 
it  is  not,  he  is,  in  every  sense,  a  man. 

To  get  the  full  measure  of  the  contrast  we 
must  turn  again  to  Esmond  who,  never  being 
able  to  view  a  situation  without  himself  at  the 
centre  of  it,  could  not  ever  raise  a  pure  ques- 
tion of  right  or  wrong.  Few  things  in  any 
novelist  are  more  subtle  than  the  way  in  which 
Thackeray  makes  Esmond  reveal  and  con- 
demn himself  in  his  meditations  following 
Castlewood's  duel.  His  patron,  who  has  just 
told  him  the  secret  of  his  birth,  lies  dying. 
What  shall  Esmond  do?  Shall  he  accept  the 
paper  in  which  the  poor  Lord  makes  confes- 
sion, or  shall  he  destroy  it  and  let  Castlewood 
die  happy  thinking  that  his  son  shall  succeed 
him?  The  situation,  since  Henry  Esmond  is 
under  such  deep  obligation  to  Castlewood,  is 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY    187 

indeed  a  hard  one.  What  was  right  for 
Henry  to  do  was  a  delicate  question  which 
Thackeray  skilfully  evades.  He  centres  our 
attention,  not  on  what  Esmond  did,  but  on 
the  reasons  for  which  he  did  it.  Here  again 
we  have  a  case  of  that  masterly  blending  of 
good  and  bad,  courage  and  weakness,  which  is 
so  characteristic  of  this  subtlest  of  novelists 
when  entirely  in  his  own  vein.  Esmond's  rea- 
sons are  all  so  plausible  that  at  first  blush  it 
is  hard  to  find  fault  with  any  of  them  and  not 
feel  that  we  condemn  ourselves.  And  yet,  if 
we  pause  and  observe  him  closely,  we  perceive, 
at  the  back  of  all  his  thoughts,  this  one  ques- 
tion: How  shall  I  feel  if  I  do  this?  That  is 
what  brands  Henry  Esmond  as  the  supreme 
sentimentalist.  He  acts,  at  bottom,  not  from 
a  desire  to  do  right,  not  from  any  passion  of 
sacrifice,  nor  from  a  sense  of  obligation  that 
will  sternly  pay  its  debt  at  whatever  cost,  but 
from  a  dread  of  his  own  sensibilities;  he  is 
afraid  that  if  he  does  otherwise  his  sensibili- 
ties will  come  back  upon  him,  he  will  be  mis- 
erable. Of  course,  he  does  not  admit  this — 
nor  any  part  of  it — not  even  to  himself.  We 
see  into  his  mind,  but  he  cannot.  Sentimen- 
talism  and  truth  exclude  each  other.  So  it 
happens  that  Henry  instantly  lards  his  motives 


188     THE  SPIRITUAL  DRAMA  IN 

over  with  a  great  to-do  about  gratitude,  sym- 
pathy, indifference  to  the  world,  the  sense  of 
honour.  Again,  we  must  remember  that  there 
is  no  question  here  of  the  right  or  wrong  of 
his  act.  All  that  has  been  swallowed  up  in 
the  revealed  falseness  of  his  motive. 

In  the  fourth  chapter  of  Denis  Duval  there 
was  a  chance  for  just  this  sort  of  a  perform- 
ance, but  Dr.  Bernard  bore  himself  in  pre- 
cisely the  opposite  way.  After  reading  that 
chapter — no  matter  whether  we  praise  or  con- 
demn his  action:  let  that  point  be  waived  as 
completely  as  in  Esmond — We  know  that 
never  in  connection  with  any  action  did  the 
Doctor  ask  himself:  hon£  shall  I  feel  if  I  do 
this? 

The  man  who  was  always  asking  himself 
that  question  thought  of  human  life  as  the 
toy  of  a  malign  fate  and  laid  every  wrong  upon 
circumstance.  The  man  who  never  asked  him- 
self that  question — or,  at  least,  never  allowed 
himself  to  be  swayed  by  it — was  once  the 
means  of  saving  Denis  from  a  false  accusation 
after  which  he  revealed  his  point  of  view  very 
simply.     Here  is  the  admiral's  account: 

"  ^Come  along  with  me,  Denny,'  says  the 
Doctor,  taking  me  by  the  shoulder:  and  he  led 
me  away  and  we  took  a  walk  in  the  town  to- 


THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY     189 

gether.  And  as  we  passed  old  Ypres  Tower, 
which  was  built  by  King  Stephen,  they  say, 
and  was  a  fort  in  old  days,  but  is  used  as  the 
town  prison  now,  ^Suppose  you  had  been 
looking  from  behind  those  bars  now,  Denny, 
and  awaiting  your  trial  at  assizes?  Yours 
would  not  have  been  a  pleasant  plight,'  Dr. 
Barnard  said. 

"  'But  I  was  innocent,  sir!  You  know  I 
was!' 

"  'Yes.  Praise  be  where  praise  is  due.  But 
if  you  had  not  providentially  been  able  to 
prove  your  innocence — if  you  and  your  friend 
Parrot  had  not  happened  to  inspect  your  box, 
you  would  have  been  in  yonder  place.  Ha! 
There  is  the  bell  ringing  for  afternoon  service, 
which  my  good  friend  Dr.  Wing  keeps  up. 
What  say  you?  Shall  we  go  and — and — offer 
up  our  thanks,  Denny — for  the — the  immense 
peril  from  which — you  have  been — de- 
livered?' 

"I  remember  how  my  dear  friend's  voice 
trembled  as  he  spoke,  and  two  or  three  drops 
fell  from  his  kind  eyes  on  my  hand,  which  he 
held.  I  followed  him  into  the  church.  In- 
deed and  indeed  I  was  thankful  for  my  deliver- 
ance from  a  great  danger,  and  even  more 
thankful  to  have  the  regard  of  a  true  gentle- 


190    THE  LIFE  OF  THACKERAY 

man^  the  wise  and  tender  friend,  who  was 
there  to  guide,  and  cheer,  and  help  me. 

*'As  we  read  the  last  psalm  appointed  for 
that  evening  service,  I  remember  how  the 
good  man  bowing  his  own  head,  put  his  hand 
upon  mine,  and  we  recited  together  the  psalm 
of  thanks  to  the  Highest,  who  had  had  respect 
unto  the  lowly,  and  who  had  stretched  forth 
his  hand  upon  the  furiousness  of  my  enemies, 
and  whose  right  hand  had  saved  me." 

The  whole  of  Denis  Duval  is  in  the  tone 
of  this  passage.  For  pure  and  elevated 
thought;  for  serene  faith;  for  the  conviction 
that  no  good  is  ever  lost;  that  life,  at  heart, 
is  both  right  and  beautiful:  in  all  these  re- 
spects this  magnificent  fragment  towers  above 
the  novels  of  its  time  like  the  central  peak  of 
a  great  range.  It  is  pleasant  to  know  that 
Thackeray's  greatest  rival  appreciated  this 
wonderful  fragment,  that  Dickens  said  of  it: 
**In  respect  of  earnest  feeling,  far-seeing  pur- 
pose, character,  incident,  and  a  certain  loving 
picturesqueness  blending  the  whole,  I  believe 
Denis  Duval  to  be  much  the  best  of  his  works." 


CHRONOLOGY  OF 
THE  MAIN  EVENTS  OF  THACKERAY'S  LIFE 


1811 
1817 
1822 
1828 
1829 
1830 


1831 
1833 
1834 


1836 


1837 
1838 

1839 
1840 

1841 
1842 
1846 
1847 


1848 


July  18,  born  at  Calcutta, 
sent  to  England, 
entered  Charterhouse, 
left  Charterhouse. 
February,  entered  Cambridge, 
left  Cambridge. 

spent  several  months  at  Weimar, 
entered  the  Middle  Temple, 
bought  "The  National  Standard." 
failure  of  the  "Standard." 
settled  at  Paris  to  study  art. 
Flore  et  Zephyr  appeared. 

August  20,  married  Isabella  Gethin  Creagh  Shawe. 
Paris  correspondent  of  "The  Constitutional." 
July,  "The  Constitutional"  Failed. 
Yellow  plush  appeared  in  "Eraser's  Magazine." 
40,  Catherine  ran  in  "Fraser's." 
Mrs.  Thackeray's  insanity  appeared. 
The  Great  Hoggarly  Diamond. 
Thackeray  began  contributing  to  "Punch." 
February  28,  first  of  the  Snob  Papers  in  "Punch." 
January,  first  number  of  Vanity  Fair, 
October,  last  of  the  Snob  Papers. 
July,  last  number  of  Vanity  Fair. 
November,  first  number  of  Pendennis, 
191 


192  CHRONOLOGY 

1850,  December,  last  number  of  Pendennis. 

1 85 1,  February  25,  elected  to  the  Athanaeum  Club. 
May  22,  first  of  the  original  course  of  lectures  on 

the  English  Humorists. 
July  3,  last  (sixth)  lecture  of  the  course. 

1852,  Esmond  published. 
Autumn,  sailed  for  America. 

1853,  Spring,  returned  from  America. 
October,  first  number  of  The  Newcomes. 

1855,  August,  last  number  of  The  Newcomes. 
October,  sailed  for  America  to  deliver  the  lectures 

on  The  Four  Georges. 

1856,  April,  returned  from  America. 

1857,  July,    defeated    at    Oxford,    as    Liberal    candidate 

for  Parliament. 
November,  first  number  of  The  Virginians. 
1859,  October,  last  number  of  The  Virginians. 
i860,  January,  began  editing  the  *'  Cornhill  Magazine." 

,  first  number  of  Lovel  the  Widower^  in  the 

"Cornhill." 
first  of  the  Roundabout  Papers. 
June,  last  number  of  Lovel  the  Widower. 

1 86 1,  January,  first  number  of  Philip  in  the  "Cornhill." 

1862,  April,  resigned  his  editorship. 
August,  last  number  of  Philip. 

1863,  worked  upon  Denis  Duval. 
November,  last  of  the  Roundabout  Papers, 
December  24,  died. 


